


Cold As Ice, Red As Blood, Fair As Spring

by Guede



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Bloodplay, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, F/F, Fae & Fairies, Full Shift Werewolves, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Rough Sex, The Black Death, Torture, Wild Hunt, Young Peter Hale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 01:52:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 38,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4858643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is one of those old winter tales, full of blood and ice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sleeping Fur

**Author's Note:**

> Time period is loosely Black Death Europe, but mostly for purposes of general technology levels. I by no means intended this as historically accurate, if the werewolves didn't clue you in.

Red is this yielding land  
turned inside out  
by a country of hunters  
with iron, flint and fire.  
Red is the fear  
that turns a knife back  
against men, holds it at their throats  
and they cannot see the claw on the handle  
the animal hand  
that haunts them  
from some place inside their blood  
\--from _The History of Red_ , Linda Hogan

  


* * *

Once there was a woods. It spanned as far as the eye could see, a thick, dense carpet of ancient trees and untouched undergrowth, which gave way only to the jagged upthrust of the Devil’s mountains on one side, and to the unceasing roar of the Black River, its waters so deep that they never froze over, even when the snow laid so thickly that it made full-grown pines look like children’s toys. Men had long since settled the far side of the river, their villages trailing here and there along its banks till they came to the great fort outcropping from the oxbend cliffs, but even now, even still, they were mere visitors to the woods.

Monsters lived amidst the trees. Great elks that would tower over a church, with antlers that would clang the bells in the belfry. Wild aurochs with shoulders as high and thick as hills, whose hooves broke the earth when they herded together. Hulking cave bears that might feed a town for a month, they were so large—or feed on a town, if for some reason they had been driven up from under the earth. And wolves. Howling, baying wolves, who crept soft and slow through the deep drifts, who left staring carcasses with rent throats to bleed out into the waterholes. Who sometimes dared to come across the river and straight into the heart of the villages, to spring out at the sleeping and unwary, and to leave death and terror in their wake.

The screams are still rising one night when a wolf slinks up to the very threshold of the lord’s cliffside stronghold, maws and chest matted with blood so fresh it steams. The wolf is young, barely an adult, and it grins at the stiff shadows guarding every corner as if reveling in the sport of it. The dash just as the head turns, the flicker of movement just beyond the reach of human sight.

It plays its game with the guards, turning their heads this way and that, and then, when the bulk of them have rushed to the back gate, it strolls up to the front, bold as you please, and lays one paw against the massive old timbers. Then it whips about and bolts for the river, and by the time the guards find that bloody mark, they can do no more than swear and point and cling to their medallions, their crosses, their charms. Some wolves here, they say, are more than wolves.

But the wolf pays no attention to the dark threats thrown in its wake. It clambers ashore and into the woods, then shakes itself off. The night is so cold that some of the water freezes between flying from its fur and striking the surrounding trees, sending up a delicate, haphazard chiming. The wolf grins again, as if enjoying the melody, and then sets off through the forest, sliding through the snarled brush and nets of dead vines so easily that one might wonder whether the beast is flesh and blood, after all.

The wolf has a heart. It beats a steady tattoo as the wolf makes its way down familiar trails, snaking away and then back to the river, until it comes to one of the narrower points, a place where the people have managed to throw a thin thing of iron and wood across the torrent. The heartbeat flips once as the wolf steps onto the bridge, then plants its feet firmly against the planks. It huffs, breath fogging densely around its face, before abruptly throwing itself back and impossibly _up_ , spine contorting and muscles bulging, to stand on two legs.

Fur recedes, muscles shift. A gangling youth stands where the wolf had been, teeth large and white and bared. He shivers a little in the frigid air, then plucks up clothing from a hiding place near the base of the bridge. A shirt, trousers, a thick bearskin cloak. Furred again, the youth strides across the bridge and down into the village on the other side.

The hour is late, and they are far from the wild cries and flaring torches downriver, yet lit candles stand in every window. It’s perhaps a more prosperous village than most, with solid buildings of wood and river stones instead of mud and wattle, and a hall at the center that is a survivor of an older, more pagan time. Upswept timbers have ends carved into fantastical monster heads and warriors wearing archaic armor, while thick tiles, dull brown in daylight but living red in torchlight, stand out brightly against the black fort in the distance.

The hall’s doors are thrown wide open, and people spill out onto its steps, wrapped into furs and clustered so they look like the beasts in the woods, lazy and lounging after a meal. Here and there someone calls out to the youth: he’s greeted casually, well-known, eyed in the way of neighborly caution everywhere. 

He returns the greetings with an absent wave, until one bundle of furs emerges from the hall. It’s much shorter than the rest, wider than it is tall, and it puts uncertain feet down on each step till one proves too wide a stretch, sending it into a squealing tumble.

The youth catches it before any damage is done, then lifts the bundle so the top of the furs falls back. A small child’s face emerges, eyes as wide with fascination as they are with disapproval.

“You’re all bloody, uncle,” the child says. A boy, putting still-chubby hands on the sticky cheeks of the youth. “Mama said—”

“Yes, yes,” the youth murmurs. He shifts the boy to a single arm, catches the small hands as they draw back and tenderly licks each clean. Then he smiles at the boy, who forgets parental sayings in favor of smiling back, and lets the child scrub at his face and neck.

By the time they mount the steps, the youth is spotless, clean as if he’d just taken soap and brush to himself. He is teasing the boy with one of the tails still attached to the furs when his name is called.

The great hearth in the center of the hall is blazing, remnants of at least three logs under the hunk currently ashing away. Across it sit two women and one men. Or, the youth sees as he comes near, one woman, a girl and a boy. The woman is tall, even for this northern reach, where the people seem to mimic the enormous pines, with a graveness that ages her well beyond her true years. In truth she is not so much older than the youth, although perhaps she is too old for the lush, dark hair that braids down her back, for the full set of white, whole teeth that gleams when she smiles at the youth. Toil and war and disease have not left this part of the world untouched, and a man in his thirties could easily have white hair and a hunched back, a woman have wrinkled face and sagging flesh.

But her skin is smooth, her eyes clear, and as she rises to take her son from her brother, her arms are strong and firm. “Peter,” she says, reproof in a single word. She glances to their guests, then turns a warmer, more conspiratorial smile upon her wayward kin. “I was beginning to think you’d be out till morning, and then you would have missed them.”

“My deepest apologies,” Peter says, with no little charm. For all his lanky build, he has a careless grace that catches the eye. He bows, then extends a hand without rising.

The girl smiles close-lipped, and allows him to kiss the back of her hand as if it were some private joke with herself. She is red-haired, rare in this area, with the fine, milky skin of a noblewoman. Her dress is somber but rich, plush wools with just a touch of gilt embroidery, and her feet are hidden in spare, sensible boots.

Peter turns to the boy, who is laughing at him.

The boy and the girl and Peter are all of around the same age, but where the girl seems wrapped in the same hauteur as his sister, the boy is lackadaisical, offhand. His dress, just as rich as his companion’s, has an awry cuff, an unbuttoned jacket, a flapping collar that shows a scarlet underlining and the shadowy, pale curve of a collarbone. He jerks forward to take Peter’s hand, grip smooth and lacking calluses but not strength. “I hear we’re to share a bed,” he says, and his voice brushes close and then shies away. His eyes glint reddish in the yellow light. “You don’t snore, I hope?”

“I try not to,” Peter says drolly. He’s ready to linger over the boy’s hand, but his amusement is reserved compared to earlier in the night, at the fort. He’s unaccustomed to someone else making the jibe, and he does not like being the butt of them. He finds it difficult to read the boy; too much movement, fingers fidgeting there, foot scuffing here, everything a nerve and nothing telling him what kind. “So we are, are we?”

“There’s a bad draft in the guest chambers, where the snow’s breached the tiles.” Talia lets Derek’s head curl down onto her shoulder, slipping an extra fur around his shoulders. She strokes his neck so his eyes, despite his best, curious efforts, begin to close. “Laura and I shall take the Lady Martin, and I thought you and Lord Stilinski might do well together.”

Peter stifles his own laugh, badly. His sister casts him a warning glance but the boy waves her aside, his head tipped in silent query.

“A lord, are we?” Peter says.

The boy blinks, and then laughs aloud. It’s a clear, ringing sound, its echoes slinking far longer about the rafters than they should. “Oh, well, you know,” he says. “You have to tell people to call you something, and ‘Lord’ will get you a better room.”

“And I’m to call you that?” But Peter is offering his arm. He nods to his sister, stoops to pet his dozing nephew, and then draws the boy away from the fire.

“Call me Stiles, if you like. It’s as good as another name,” says the boy. He tucks himself close to Peter. They’re nearly of a height, Peter a fraction taller, but the boy is as lanky as Peter and may yet overtake him. If such things interest him; the boy catches Peter’s measuring and smiles, presses closer, his head just a fraction impertinent in its angle and nearness to Peter’s throat. Then he shivers, drops his chin and stretches his neck. “You keep a cold house, Hale.”

“Well done,” Peter says after a moment. He half-turns, slowing his stride, and they look at each other, werewolf and boy. The clouds of their breath flirt across their faces.

Not a boy, Peter thinks, turning away. Not a boy, not from that side of the woods, where the old folk still venture forth on their moonbeam steeds, so light not a blade of grass bends under them, yet trampling all in their wake like the human lord walled up in his fortress. And yet he is not so much like them, with their stern unchanging ways, their iron rules. He laughs, he stumbles, he curses into Peter’s shoulder as a draft spins up under their furs.

“Here,” Peter says. He wraps his arm around the boy, cuts his body through the layers of furs, and for a moment they press together. The boy’s surprised puff catches at the base of Peter’s throat, then floats upward, whispers of heat slowly icing away.

The boy, this Stiles, looks up at him. There is no blood on Stiles’ face, no trace of it in his smell—snow and wind and a hint of smoky peat—but Peter looks in his eyes and sees it there, the same bleeding wound that drives Peter himself out night after night, sends him up to the fort to mock the guards and leave his kills for them to find.

Peter thinks of asking, and then thinks the better of it. He is curious and nothing more. He does not care who was the wound in this boy-lord, this errant from the fair folk.

He cares that Stiles is warm and willing, with a mouth as hungry as Peter’s own. He cares that his blood is still running high from the night’s hunt, and needs something else to cool and calm it before he’ll sleep tonight, and that this Stiles seems to not care if Peter takes him for that.

They fall into Peter’s room, furs unraveling around them, tangling their feet as Peter chivvies them across the floor. The air steams over the braziers set in the corners and is like ice everywhere else. Peter can almost see the white fingers of it press down into Stiles’ bare shoulders, across his chest.

“It’s not my house,” Peter says, almost carelessly, as he strips his own shirt. He pushes Stiles back into the bed, then crawls over him, snaking them out of trousers along the way. Stiles is so chilled that his skin pinks where Peter touches him. “It’s Talia’s, my sister’s.”

“Well, it’s still cold,” Stiles says. He shudders over and over, nipping hotly at Peter’s lips, jaw. Chest, when Peter growls at Stiles’ pause over his throat, and then lower, at the quivering belly, before Peter shoves him towards the headboard.

The furs heap up around them, then close over like snow around a sinking foot. Stiles gasps and reaches up past Peter, as if afraid he’s drowning. He closes his arm around Peter’s back instead, when Peter pins him and licks over one pretty candy bud of a nipple. “Hold still,” Peter croons, sliding his hands over the slim body under him. “I’ll warm you soon enough.”

Stiles laughs at him again, but breathless, falling. They burrow through the furs till Stiles is squirming against the thick cushioning pad between them and the base platform. He arches and his nails prick Peter’s back almost badly enough to hurt. “It’s,” he hisses.

“Warm,” Peter agrees. He smooths one hand over the pad, heated by the steam blowing up from the kitchen fires and into the platform. Then he smooths it down Stiles’ body, from shoulder over lean, narrow chest, down the side to rest just at the hip. He smiles as Stiles twists and turns, trying to urge him further, and stays where he is. “You’re not doing what I said.”

Stiles snorts. Bends like willow, his throat curved and bare, his hands rising to draw shivers out of Peter’s hips despite Peter’s best efforts, long, ticklish, tender fingertips shaping out each muscle. Peter catches himself on his forearms, his teeth barely touching that stretched, fragile throat, and then laughs as he slides his knee up between Stiles’ spread legs.

“Not your house, is it? Not your word I have to follow,” Stiles says breathlessly. He buries the top of his head in the furs, pushes up on his shoulders, his arms splayed with empty palms turned up, and rubs them together like he is trying to catch them afire. Then he twists over, quicksilver, just as Peter’s teeth graze his skin.

He arches again, his back to Peter, pushing the frail skin of his nape up so the blood nearly beats itself into Peter’s mouth. Peter snarls at him, digs claws into the tender flesh of his thighs. It’s a game and then it isn’t, the heat in Peter’s blood swinging from lust to anger in the blink of an eye.

And then to lust again, driven by the bowed head, the small pained noises, the sweet creamy spread of flesh beneath him. This boy, with his mocking eyes, this misplaced fairy lord, the very hills might turn for him but here he lies low for Peter.

They rut against each other under the piles of hides. Their breath and the heat of their bodies turns it moist and slick in the close darkness, smooth skin rasping over the coarser fur, chafing unseen and untended. Peter sinks his teeth deep into one shoulder, surprisingly meaty for such a slender build, and the smell of blood mixes into the clinging, humid air, clearing only with the infrequent slice of a cold draft.

Stiles cries for him, long shuddering sounds like a wounded animal, but the hands on Peter’s hips and the backs of his thigh are just as greedy as he, just as ruthless. He sucks the blood off Stiles’ back and throat by feel and by smell and one long-fingered hand catches his own, pulls it firmly up between two quivering thighs.

His head breaks into the free air. Black and grey and brown furs shake around him, a patchwork of bodies that once were, that for a moment seem come again, swarming tight under his bleary eyes. Peter snarls instinctively, crouches down over what’s his, finds himself drowning under the hides again, pulled under by the velvet suck of yielding, warm flesh. He pushes and pushes and it gives and gives before him, until suddenly he’s surrounded and it has him close and snug. When he gasps, his mouth fills with blood and sweat.

They rest for a while, after. The steam heat builds uncomfortably beneath, close to stinging through the cotton pad. Peter noses free of the furs but then stills with nothing past his shoulders showing. He keeps his arm looped around the other boy, keeps them back to chest; he’s wrung limp, satisfied, sleep sidling near like a friendly pet, but something pricks at him, keeps him from letting it curl close enough. Pride, perhaps. Or confusion, or something else that he will not quite acknowledge but that nevertheless draws his nerves taut, sends his eyes darting about the room, keeps the tips of his claws showing. He cannot help but feel that as much as he took, something in turn was taken.

“Your own house,” Stiles says sleepily. He arches again, languid, loose, all that jagged energy melted to a warming simmer. His skin is perfect and unmarred, and when Peter traces one tiny pulsing vein where the bone of the shoulder pushes it up, the track seals up behind the claw, leaving only a few round drops of blood. “You think high, mister wolf.”

“Not so high, mister mischief in the night,” Peter says. He lays his cheek against the slim back, listens to the heart beating under the spine. It pushes rather than drums, one slow, firm beat after another. “Only what I deserve.”

Stiles laughs, then turns, twisting so his arm crooks over his face and he peers out from under it, like a lolling puppy. He reaches up and lays one silken palm to Peter’s cheek, and then, a second before Peter means to bite him, runs the ball of his thumb like lightning across the bridge of Peter’s bared teeth.

“You think that’s my name?” he says playfully, and Peter subsides, unconvinced at the lack of insult but confused. Stiles pushes up on his other arm, runs his fingers into Peter’s hair and then out, and though he comes nowhere near it Peter feels the ghost of a hand clutch at his neck. “So long as it’s warmer in your house, mister wolf.”

Peter bares more of his teeth, then bites. It’s a nip instead of a true bite, a sting at Stiles’ jaw that makes him arch his shoulders like a fawning cat, spread his knees so his body cradles Peter, and in spite of the cold slicking down his back Peter feels his blood stir again. “Come and see,” he snarls, pushing them back into the furs.

They fuck again, and then again, slipping from corner to corner of the generous mattress till all parts are damp and stained with their leavings. The furs steam around them like living hides again, like elk huddled about a hot spring, till they’re driven atop them once again, shivering around each other from the chill bite of the air above, slick from the sweated-out oils of the furs below. Peter licks at Stiles’ throat once, and he can taste the bear and the moose fat, the sting of plain salt sweat, and then, beneath that, he thinks he tastes something else, something both sharper and richer. Something older. Something—

Stiles rolls over him, drags down his body like a hot tongue, takes his cock up with mouth and hands, and Peter loses the taste in the taste of his own blood, biting his hand as he comes. He feels blurred around the edges, running in the heat. Too sluggish in the cold. He slithers after the other boy, twines up around him, and sleeps.

When he wakes, Stiles and the girl are long since gone, off on the next leg of a very, very long journey, or so his sister tells him. His sister’s children crowd around them, listening to every word, not minding Talia when she tries to send them to morning lessons, to morning chores. His sister herself seems a little slipshod this day, a little less cleanly lined in the weak dawn light. Her braid is slightly awry, her brooch crooked. She puts her hand on his arm when he straightens it for her, and for a moment it feels like childhood again, his smile and her bright eyes against the world.

And the children at their feet, they look at him with such shining young eyes. He loves them, he thinks, and then he looks at this great hall around them, where he will never be more than one step below his sister, and his blood twists. But he smiles, smiles, smiles, and the rest of them, they see no more than that, and so they go on and so he forgets the boy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The heated beds are more of an Asian thing, although the Romans did have the general hypocaust concept. You pipe the smoke off the fire and under the bed platform. It was common, and in fact, considered an essential part of hospitality, to share a bed for warmth.
> 
> The full text of the quoted poem:
> 
> First  
> there was some other order of things  
> never spoken  
> but in dreams of darkest creation.
> 
> Then there was black earth,  
> lake, the face of light on water.  
> Then the thick forest all around  
> that light,  
> and then the human clay  
> whose blood we still carry  
> rose up in us  
> who remember caves with red bison  
> painted in their own blood,  
> after their kind.
> 
> A wildness  
> swam inside our mothers,  
> desire through closed eyes,  
> a new child  
> wearing the red, wet mask of birth,  
> delivered into this land  
> already wounded,  
> stolen and burned  
> beyond reckoning.
> 
> Red is this yielding land  
> turned inside out  
> by a country of hunters  
> with iron, flint and fire.  
> Red is the fear  
> that turns a knife back  
> against men, holds it at their throats,  
> and they cannot see the claw on the handle,  
> the animal hand  
> that haunts them  
> from some place inside their blood.
> 
> So that is hunting, birth,  
> and one kind of death.  
> Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.  
> Red was the infinite fruit  
> of stolen bodies.  
> The doctors wanted to know  
> what invented disease  
> how wounds healed  
> from inside themselves  
> how life stands up in skin,  
> if not by magic.
> 
> They divined the red shadows of leeches  
> that swam in white bowls of water:  
> they believed stars  
> in the cup of sky.  
> They cut the wall of skin  
> to let  
> what was bad escape  
> but they were reading the story of fire  
> gone out  
> and that was a science.
> 
> As for the animal hand on death’s knife,  
> knives have as many sides  
> as the red father of war  
> who signs his name  
> in the blood of other men.
> 
> And red was the soldier  
> who crawled  
> through a ditch  
> of human blood in order to live.  
> It was the canal of his deliverance.  
> It is his son who lives near me.  
> Red is the thunder in our ears  
> when we meet.  
> Love, like creation,  
> is some other order of things.
> 
> Red is the share of fire  
> I have stolen  
> from root, hoof, fallen fruit.  
> And this was hunger.
> 
> Red is the human house  
> I come back to at night  
> swimming inside the cave of skin  
> that remembers bison.  
> In that round nation  
> of blood  
> we are all burning,  
> red, inseparable fires  
> the living have crawled  
> and climbed through  
> in order to live  
> so nothing will be left  
> for death at the end.
> 
> This life in the fire, I love it.  
> I want it,  
> this life.
> 
> \--Linda Hogan, "The History of Red," from _The Book of Medicines_ (Coffee House Press, 1993)


	2. Silver Rampant

The ground is frozen. The men bring out axes and picks, and hew out chunks of turf that can be stacked like so many bricks at the side. They make what they call a hole, what looks to Chris like a bare gash, bloodless and dry and black amidst the white snow that creeps up on them in all directions. He makes them dig down another two feet.

They hate him for it. He can see it in the set of their shoulders, the grim straight lines of their mouths, the short swings of their tools, but he doesn’t care. He’s the son of Lord Argent. He’s the master of the teams that patrolled the riverbanks and the edges of the great wood that borders it, that still keep the people alive and that kill those which threaten them. He himself has killed a heap of trophies decorating the halls of his father’s stronghold: bears standing as tall as one man upon another’s shoulder, slinking mountain cats with claws like butcher’s knives. Wolves, ravening, clever creatures that dare come up to the very doors, wolves that walk on four feet and on two.

He’s a grieving father, burying his only child, and he does not give a damn what they think of him.

The grave is finally deep enough to keep his daughter’s body away from scavengers. They’re tenacious, the animals of the woods. They always were, and the great death that is ravaging these lands has only made them bolder. They will come down and claw into fresh graves and pull out the bodies, leaving the chewed remnants scattered across a cemetery for the horrified family to find. If there is a family left.

“Priest said he wouldn’t be here for another hour,” one of his men says. The rest of them gather around his back, sour-looking when they aren’t glancing at the fort behind them.

He knows what they want, to go back behind those massive walls and hide, as if that stops the death and carnage. But his father has them blinded, content to sit on their stockpiles and watch everything rot around them.

His own father. Yes, Chris thinks, if there is any family left, and instead of ordering them he walks to the heavy wooden chest that holds all that he loves in this world.

It is needlessly ornate, made out of planks of some dense, dark wood from the south, part of his wife’s dowry. The planks had covered the rough stonework of Victoria’s chambers, her preference over the usual softening tapestries. When she had died, only a few months before, his father had taken the chambers for others and shifted him to a smaller set in a lesser wing. Allison had railed but he hadn’t cared, blinded himself.

Now his grief is a hard-packed shell, leaving his eyes clear, and he can see the grotesque mockeries that will carry his daughter to the grave. Carved with great skill, he will grant that, but grotesque nonetheless—gaping monsters, potbellied monks, galloping demons consorting with gay ladies. Fevered, wine- and drug-addled fantasies from the craftsman, one of a horde of hangers-on and worse that his father has lately seen fit to take in.

He looks at the damned things anyway. Runs his fingers over their obscene curves, even as he hears ax and pick drop one by one to the ground. His eyes sting and he looks up, over the whitened landscape, and the glitter of the damnably bright sun makes his eyes burn.

Chris blinks it away. He looks out over the river, at the rushing waters that even now, even with ice one, two feet thick in the nearby ponds and lakes, do not freeze over. Devil’s waters, some call them, and unbidden his gaze wanders downriver to a dark, barren blot. The pilings of what was once a bridge stand next to it, still rearing their heavy heads from the river.

“You burned that town, didn’t you?” says a clear, female voice.

He turns sharply, his hand on the sword that never leaves his side. What he sees is a youth, dressed in rich velvet and furs, cloak thrown open to show a pretty gilt confection of a sword at one hip. The boy smiles at him and Chris grimaces, dips his head. He turns farther, and finds the girl leaning over Allison’s coffin.

She straightens at his step forward, her eyes wide. She’s Allison’s age, fashionably pale but her cheeks are ruddy with health, her lips full and red. She is a beauty, vivid with life, and for a moment Chris hates her for it like he hates nothing, not even his father.

“He did,” the boy says. He steps through the snow as if his feet were made of feathers, so light that it is a shock to see the tracks behind him. “Burned the whole village, shut up in their houses. Living or dead, they burned.”

“It was cursed and forsaken,” Chris says slowly. The words are thick and bitter in his mouth. “Filled with witches and monsters.”

The girl clasps her hands together and her cloak clasps around her, soft and pretty as a flower bud. But she looks like something else, with her flaming hair and black clothes. She looks like a burning ember thrown against the snow, and then she smiles with her red, red lips and Chris sees something else through a sudden haze risen between them. Someone else. Someone who too has a red, red mouth, but the red is blood, not health, and the mouth is snarling, not smiling, and then it is screaming—

He turns away. “What did they do?” she asks him.

“They didn’t sicken and die like the rest.” He stands with his daughter, with his daughter’s grave. He looks for that damned priest, but the path up to the graveyard is empty.

“How terrible,” the boy says, with false gravity. He is more restless than the girl, moving here and there between the graves. He respects their boundaries, never lets his foot stride over one, and yet there is something profane about his senseless meandering.

The boy turns, catches Chris bridling. He smiles as if apologizing, and then turns out of the cemetery gate, walking up the slight incline. The wind catches his cloak and spreads it behind him like a raven’s wings.

“I am sorry that you have been so plagued,” the girl says solemnly. When Chris turns to her, she is still and somber, a lovely statue at his daughter’s grave.

His father will spare the wood for the coffin but will not spare the time to come himself, and there is no one left in the fort who seems to care to remember a bright, laughing girl, who was always far too kind for their family’s hard hands, harder blood. Chris thinks that he should be grateful for this much, for a stranger’s mere pity, and then he pulls his shoulders back and his head up, and reminds himself that he shall not be grateful. That he shall instead see things for what they are, and they are abuses and wrongs and sins.

“I am sorry that I was not able to meet her, your daughter,” the girl continues. Then she hesitates. Her head cocks to the side, her hands lift slightly beneath her cloak. “I am sorry.”

She seems sincere, and yet, like the boy, Chris feels his hackles rising. He has watched all the manner of things in the woods, has watched even more in the halls of his father. He knows a feint when he sees one, and even when he cannot see it, his gut knows it. “We will not be married,” he says roughly. “You may rest easy, my lady, you will not be bargained off to a mere huntsman with blood under his nails and mud on his boots, someone twice your years.”

“My lord,” the girl says, as if the title is something she can grip to her bosom.

“Whatever my father said to you, I have no intention of taking another wife,” Chris tells her. He turns on his heel and stares down the path again, then swallows his bile and bends to grip one end of Allison’s coffin. “I will not marry you. He’ll have his heir through my sister, if at all.”

The girl is silent and still. She stands with her cloak folding her up, close and watchful, like those black birds that gather wherever there is death, while he grunts and pushes and heaves. He drags the coffin over the frozen ground and the stones and stiff earth tear at the fine carvings, knocking off splinters and chips in his wake. Chris kicks those aside, and puts his shoulder to it, and finally, he wrestles the coffin into the grave.

The hole is too short. He has no room to stand at one end and lay the coffin properly in the bottom, and has to climb out and go around and then push at the other one with his feet. He is kicking his child into the grave and he wants to laugh and to beat in the coffin with his fists, and instead he heaves and shoves till the box is sitting within the four corners of the hole.

When the priest comes, if he comes, if he still lives and still bothers to wear his robes, he can say his useless words. They failed Allison during the sickness and they will do nothing for the poor, lifeless thing that lies within the coffin, bloated and discolored even with the cold. That was why they should use that wood, his father had reasoned; it was supposed to have powers to protect against disease, and would keep what had killed her sealed within, keep the rest of them safe.

Chris doesn’t care. In truth he would have the great death take him too, if it could. But he cares to not see violence done on what remains of his daughter. He cares to not have to bury her again, and so he will take the coffin his father gave him and he will pack the hunks of iced earth around and over it, and then he will pile the river stones high over the top, so that the body will stay in the damned ground.

He kneels by the grave when he has finished. His eyes are dry; his hands are sticky with blood. He is too tired to be anything but numb, and then the girl speaks to him again.

“I am sorry,” she says.

“Did you _wish_ to marry?” he says. He had half-forgotten her, and when he turns his head, it’s as if he’s seeing her anew.

She is smiling. She is smiling, and her teeth are so white and so sharp, and her hands—he looks at them, expecting claws, and he starts when all he sees are smooth ovals, glossed pink like the first rosebuds of spring.

“I am sorry,” she says again, and then she nods at the path. “I am sorry because you will speak to him, if you and I are to have nothing to do with each other.”

He looks up and the boy is back, and something is with him, hunched darkly at his feet. The boy has his hand down, gripping thick tufts of fur, and as he pets the monstrous thing, looking at Chris, the fur about the throat shifts to show a glint of silver.

“Come,” the girl says. She is standing before Chris, sudden and unexpected, and when he starts back she reaches down and grips his shoulder like a man three times her size, and draws him to his feet with hardly a stir of breath. She drops her hand to his wrist, turns over his hand and tsks at the dirt and blood matting his palm. “Come, wash this. Clean the wound, bandage it, sit by the fire and warm yourself. You are still the lord-in-waiting, you must remember that.”

Chris snatches his hand away. He steps back from her, fighting the snarl in his throat. “I know who I am, with no help from you, my lady.”

“And that is why I am sorry,” she says. She dips within her cloak, then pulls out a snowy square of cloth, as blank as the fields that surround them. Then she offers it to him. “You are who you are, my lord, and no matter your wishes, you must deal with what comes with it.”

“But I need not deal with _you_ ,” Chris says. He takes another step from her and his boot slips on a loose stone.

He catches himself, turns, and finds that he’s nearly walked onto his daughter’s grave. He shudders, then sucks the air between his teeth. The cold of it burns his throat as well as any flame.

“True.” The girl still holds the handkerchief towards him. “But you may find you would have preferred me, my lord.”

Chris barks a laugh. He turns from her and sees the boy, still standing sentinel on the path. The thing with him, the wolf, it has risen to its feet, its massive head nearly level with the boy’s chest, and it watches him with cold blue eyes. Then the silver collar around its neck jerks. The boy smiles and the flash of his teeth seems brighter than the ones bared in the wolf’s snarl.

The boy turns, and walks his pet away, while the girl stays with the grave. For a moment Chris lingers, and then he sets his shoulder to her. Her hands are soft, unmarked; she will not meddle here on her own, and he is still in a position to hear if she has help. And if he does, then so help him, he will find her and he will strike her down. He does not care who she is, who she _truly_ might be, or what his father has to say to her.

“You may,” she says.

“And what would I want that you could possibly give me?” he says.

He looks over his shoulder, just the once. Careless from irritation, and the light on the snow catches him in the eyes and it burns. He stops, shakes his head, and when he looks again, he thinks he sees blood on that white handkerchief she still holds out to him. Blood, dripping and spreading.

When he looks again, she has lowered her arm. The handkerchief is crumpled in her hand, only the edges showing, but those edges are white. And then it is gone, disappeared beneath her cloak, and the only red and white are her hair and her skin.

“Nothing,” she says, sighing. “We offer nothing, my lord.”

And there he leaves her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was, sadly, very common for Dark Age European communities to blame the nearest group of outsiders for the plague (Jews, lepers, prostitutes, old women, whoever else wasn't socially acceptable) and to commit atrocities on them. And then the plague kept going anyway.


	3. Blood Thirst

Kate climbs up onto the table. Beer sloshes over her hand and down her sleeve, lukewarm like blood. They’re well into the third hour of feasting and the giant tun they’ve tapped is the second that’s been dragged up from the cellars, but there’s been wine and more than a few flasks of stronger stuff floating about, and so that tun has been sitting by the fire, still half-full for the better part of two hours.

It’s disappointing, she thinks, curling her lip at the drunken layabouts crowding about the table. She kicks off a reaching hand, turning her sneer into a sweet smile, and then laughs sincerely as she slashes another to the bone with her hip knife. Its owner reels back, howling, while his comrades jeer and step away.

They’re disappointing, but they’re vicious and they’re easily led, and that’s all that she asks of them. She lifts her lip at them and then she hoists her mug high, and when they all follow her lead, she spreads her other arm to take them all in. “To the Argents!” she shouts.

They shout back, stomp their feet, pound their fists. A few mugs smash to pieces on the slicked, muddy stones. One splashes into the roaring blaze in the fireplace, and puts out half the flames before the other half eats it up as if it were oil.

Kate laughs again. She has blood crusted on her boots, a full purse on her belt. Three men in the local jail and ten dead villagers, while the rest cower in the corners of the hall or burrow behind locked doors like the pathetic mice they are, and outside in the courtyard, spitted and flayed like the best game, two dead wolves. It’s a good night. She’s alive and whole and happy.

She raises her mug a second time. “To the hunt!” she says.

The echoing din is softer already, heads rolling on shoulders, mugs clattering empty to the table. Kate frowns, kicks at one. She bends and shakes a man by the shoulder, then throws him towards the tun. She’s had her share of drink, but she doesn’t feel a drop of it. Her blood is up and the blood of a hunter, a _true_ hunter, it can burn anything else to the ground.

“Get up, you louts!” she calls around the room. “Get up and raise your arms, get up and drink! Get up, get up, do you think you’re dead now? Get up!”

They sway and stare at her, blinking, bleary, but she kicks and punches her way down the table, and when she turns around, she sees a small sea of rosy, bright faces. If they’re rosy with booze, if they’re bright with pain, she doesn’t care. She loves them, these stupid silly fools, loves their bodies and their blood that they spill under her boots.

She leads a third toast. “To the wolves! For without them, we’d have no kills but each other!”

And then she drains her mug. Around Kate a cheer goes up, but it’s ragged, confused, trailing like the broken reins on a runaway mount. She looks down and they leer uncertainly at her, cold fear breaking up their drunken follies like so much spring ice, rotten and brittle. One or two make gestures half-hidden beneath the table, or behind a comrade’s backs, and she laughs brightest for them.

“Keep on drinking!” she orders, stepping off the table. “I paid for it, you’d better drink it. Or I’ll slit your bellies and then pour in the rest, for I’m not leaving a drop of my drink for the innkeeper.”

The fire spits a high lick of flame, and a matching crimson glow across the hall. It’s a bit finer than most, with the cobblestone floor that looks full of hot coals under the yellow light, but the mug Kate jams under the tun’s spigot is crude pottery, shaped for thick peasant fingers, and the sight Kate sees when she steps outside is thatched roofs and split-tile ones, squat, ugly buildings clustered down the one road for the place.

She snorts, wipes her hand down her leather coat. She doesn’t care for the finer things, never has. Not like the rest of her family, great lords in their brute fortress, killing things in silk and velvet. She wants the best weapons, food to keep her going, clothes sturdy enough to keep out rain and snow. Fools to leap at the snap of her fingers. All but the first come cheap enough.

And things to bleed. The skinless bodies swing on their poles, creaking like leather; they’ve half-frozen in the cold air, though there’s no snow on the ground. They’re pitiful, pale things, more like dummies of fat and string than real corpses, and as Kate looks at them she feels the warmth of the tavern and the toasts recede. Something gnaws at her edges, that one thing she can never manage to kill.

She snarls at it. The beer slops in her mug and something about the sound angers her. She snaps her hand and half the stuff dashes out, spreading over the ground before beading up. The dirt’s too frozen to drink it up.

Kate digs at the ground with her boot heel, trying to make it, and then gives up with a little, charmless laugh. She looks at the bodies again, at the thick dark ribbon of dried blood streaking from one’s headless neck, and then she goes forward.

She is on one knee by the body, her hand shaking its shoulder, the mug below the neck to catch a few last drops, when she hears the clop of hooves. Kate rises slowly, with one hand to the knife in her belt. She drinks the beer as the horse heads rear out of the night, into the dim circle of light from the tavern windows. It’s cold now, cold enough for tiny unseen flecks of ice to brush up against her lips.

It’s a mounted man leading a four-in-hand carriage. The horses are weary, heads low to their knees, rimes of frozen sweat glazing their backs and flanks. “Lady Argent?” the man calls.

He’s a pretty young poppet, all beardless cheeks and stern jaw. His cloak and boots are furred with the best ermine, his spurs look like real silver, and he rides a horse whose long, delicate legs look like they’d rather warm themselves in a heat over hard, fast, clear ground. The carriage horses are built more sturdily, still high-bred but with bulk and coarse winter hides, and thick white caps of fur hiding each hoof.

“I’ve answered to that before,” Kate says, when the man lets his horse stamp impatiently. She spreads her feet a shoulder’s width apart, lets her hand ride on her knife hilt. She knows what she looks like to popinjays like this: leather-clad, indecent in riding trousers and close-fitting top, hair long and loose and so softly gold, even in such poor light. She smiles and raises her mug to him. “And your lord would be who, my fine gentleman?”

He goes stiff in the saddle. His horse, never easy, dances from foot to foot and his tight jaw looks to rattle with the uneven rocking. “I come from your father, Lady Argent,” he says. “He bids you come home.”

“Oh, well, does he.” Kate takes another long pull of the beer. The flecks are pebbles now, large enough to catch between her teeth. She cracks one between her molars and watches him start. “Well, tell him I bid him long life and everlasting health.”

She turns on her heel. He’s rising in his stirrups to call out to her, the curt inhale all she needs to hear, when another voice comes out of the darkness.

“He wishes you to come for your brother,” says a woman’s voice.

Kate turns back. The carriage door is open, and the fair thing standing in it is hardly more than a girl. But her hair looks like spilled blood in the darkness, and her face rises like the moon from her dense black wrap. She smiles and a sudden stretching of the tavern light catches her eyes and teeth, turns each liquid red.

“My brother,” Kate says, half-skeptical. She taps her fingers against her knife. “My brother and I, we parted ways a while ago. He’s a…good, a _very_ good man, my brother. With his good wife and his good daughter, and oh, it’s been a long, long time since he’s called for me. He’s welcome to our father.”

“He no longer has that privilege,” the girl says, so gently, like a thin needle slipped into the throat. “Your brother. He was in the woods for a day and a night, and when he came back out he was no longer one that your father would call son.”

“He’s a monster,” the popinjay says. His horse skitters till he’s half-between Kate and the girl, and he himself sits with arms thrown akimbo, head high, as if he’d do more than break his own neck, coming for her. “He’s a demon, and your father—”

The girl twists her hand in the furs, and the popinjay falls silent even before she speaks. “Jackson,” she says sweetly, dismissively. She still smiles at Kate, for Kate. “I am Lady Whittemore, and this is Count Whittemore, my husband. We were rescued by your father’s men from the woods, and in payment we offered our help in finding you and returning you home.”

“Well, you’ve found me.” Kate swirls the mug in her hand. It feels too heavy, the beer within too sluggish, and so she lets the handle slip from her fingers. The mug cracks open at her feet to show insides nearly iced over; she tilts her head and listens to the slurring fade of the men behind her.

She takes a step forward and the popinjay relaxes. The girl simply watches.

“Chris,” Kate says thoughtfully. “My brother. Why was he in the woods?”

The girl’s smile broadens. She shifts in her furs, the night chill catching her, and the cloak heaps high on her shoulders but dips in the front, above the clasp of her arms. A long, slender neck, like a stem of ivory, is disclosed, and then the creamier but no less pale, no less frail, beginnings of her bosom.

“Because your father put him there,” she tells Kate.

Kate grins at the girl. She glances to the tavern, not out of regret or reluctance, but because she always looks for those who would follow her, and when she sees no one she grins even more and strides to the carriage. She takes the girl’s hand, cages it in her own tanned, rough fingers, and steps up into the carriage. Sits on the same side, presses her fingers into the plush fur that envelopes this fine, sharp lady, so fresh and new that a trace of musk crushes free under her hand.

When the girl makes to move her arm, Kate twists her wrist and closes her hand over the girl’s arm. She stretches her shoulders, feeling the sink of her fingers into tender flesh, the slight tremble in the girl’s body, and then she stretches her legs, pushing them out before her. Kate smiles at the dour, disapproving face of the popinjay, who rides up to close the door, and then turns to her new traveling mate.

“And did you meet my brother, Lady Whittemore?” Kate asks.

The girl leans forward, so close that the sweet milky smell of her chases up from the musky fur. “Call me Lydia,” she says. A stray lock of her hair brushes Kate’s shoulder, and then she leans back so her eyes glitter from the shadows. “And yes, yes, I did.”

“Well, don’t keep me waiting,” Kate says. “Tell me. Tell me all about him, now.”


	4. Running Fur

There was a blizzard, a ferocious storm out of the northeast that drove icicles into tree trunks like nails, that piled snow up till it suffocated people in their homes, that forced game out of the woods only to drown in the river, the only part of the land not buried alive. Day after day, the clouds bellied low over the horizon, sullen, swollen beasts that bore an endless torrent of fat, heavy flakes which clung to the skin, coated everything like the softest of shrouds.

Talia has them drive holes up through the drifts for the chimneys, clear a path to the river for water, and then retire to crouch about their fires. The storerooms are well-built and sealed with layers of tar, full of dry tinder and drier meat. Stringy, shriveled sinew, tasteless, sucking moisture from the mouth and throat so a mere swallow feels like a bucket of burning sand. And their rooms: smoke-filled, dense dens, crowded with bodies, smelling of piss and sweat and anger.

She keeps them in. “There’s nothing out there,” she says. “Nothing, Peter. The deer are dead in the valleys, or starving up the mountain. Not even the foxes are running. We stay here, inside, with the heat.”

“It’ll drive us mad,” Peter rails at her. He paces back and forth in her room, in what’s left of her room, caged into a single corner by a hanging hide. Behind it he can hear the stop-start mutter of her children. He has been hearing it for so long it rubs like a pebble in his shoe against an open sore. He turns and snarls, and the children quiet just as his sister does.

She rises over him, implacable, immovable. For all that motherhood has stooped her shoulders, manhood has broadened his, she still rules with the flick of her hand, the glint of her teeth. He snarls again, but slips backward, his hands lowered, his throat bared even as he chokes on it.

“You’ve already gone mad,” she says. She sweeps her hand at the chink of a window and her claws catch on wood, nearly so on oilpaper turned rank in the steaming heat. “No one goes out in this weather, Peter. No one. No one but the damned and the devil-touched, and they are already watching us.”

“They’ve always watched.” He lashes his body like a whip, coiling and uncoiling, seeking the free air. “Ever since they came, since we _allowed_ them to come. Shut up in that fort of theirs, like rats. Like we are. Do you want to be a rat, sister? Do you want to sit here and gnaw at each other, till we’re nothing but thin little bones?”

“You know what I want,” she snarls back at him. The fur creeps out of her demure sleeves, down from her matron’s braid, black and coarse. She twists her body to meet his, match him, twists like him, restless and savage beneath her stately reserve.

They bare teeth at each other, grinning, feral, lost together for a moment in the remembered spurt of blood, the wheeze of a last breath under sharp gripping teeth. He thinks perhaps she has not forgotten how to understand.

Someone cries somewhere in the hall. Some puling, unfeeling puppy, whining and sobbing like the worst of cowards. Talia goes still, and he can see the force of the calm pushing over her. Her skin smooths, olive and hairless, her teeth turn square and blunt.

“That was not our decision, to let them in, but we must live with them now,” she tells him.

“That is not _my_ decision,” Peter spits at her. He claws at her fine wooden floor, barefoot like any serf, then spurns the splinters that flake up with a flick of his heel. “If I could—”

“If you could what, brother?” Talia says. Loud, harsh, echoing. The hall seems to turn icy and silent in its wake. She comes up to him, soundless in her pretty velvet slippers, comes up to him so close that they could twine throats. That the clip of her teeth on her words seems to clip his breath. “If you could lead, Peter? If you could, if you could think beyond your hate and your jealousy and your passing lusts, if you had any head at all for watching for others, for thinking of what _they need_. If you took a care for anything but yourself—”

He snarls at her, swipes at her skirts. His claws are out, a grave challenge, but he has made graver. They are sister and brother and they have seen winters like this before, tangled in holes smaller than this.

She snaps at him and her teeth catch. They break skin in the slightest of ways, barely a drop to stain the floor, but he skitters back, his hand clapped to his throat, his eyes wide. He stares at this sister of his, who has raised him and sheltered him and cheered him. Who has hurt him.

Talia stares back. Her mouth is open, her hands limp at her sides. They feel, for a moment, the damp grime of the smoky air, the close heat, the few feet that part them. The years, and the things other than years, which fall between, ever more as they stay silent, ever farther from the girl who once promised to never force him out, like their parents had done to their own siblings. From the boy who had sworn every hunter’s heart to her, as they laid in the dappled shade of the woods and had dreamed of the old times, the days before the Argent lords had come and had begun to bend this land to tameness.

“I will not see you die,” she says at last, soft and stern and so still, his sister. “Peter.”

“Then you’ll see my back,” he says. He cannot keep from moving, he takes the measure of the room once more before throwing aside the hide wall. “I cared long enough, longer than most, and now—”

“You care when they fight, you care so that you miss when they bleed, when they are hurt, when they fall behind!” she snarls after him. Spurred to life at last, but still chained here, still sitting on her petrifying haunches. “You’ll care when you see them all dead, and then you’ll—”

He will not, whatever she meant to say after him. He does not care to listen anymore. Peter knees his way through the startled children, makes his way into the hall and then out the doors.

The wind slaps him across the front like a sodden, bone-chilling blanket. His eyes widen and he gasps, and he stares out over the blanked landscape, the scalloped mounds and icy inclines where once his village stood. His hands tighten on the door. He thinks of her, stiff and cold under those massive drifts, and he shivers as much as he growls.

“Uncle,” says a breathless voice behind him. His sister’s son, a raw, retiring youth, still clinging to the shadow of whoever passes him. He worries his lip, folds in his body as if he doesn’t already match Peter in height. “Uncle. Where are you—are you leaving?”

“I need air,” Peter says. He shakes off his arm, then his leg. A few minutes and the snow already has layered a thick second skin over him. “We need air, Derek. We’re meant to run, to see the sky, to take what we want out in the open. This—burrowing, it’s not for us. We’re not _moles_ , are we?”

Peter tears at his clothes as he speaks. He will lose the shirt, and Talia will laugh—will not laugh now, he thinks savagely, and the shirt is just another shirt. And it clutches at him, strangling, and he strips it off and then strips off the rest, and shakes away the smell of the hall, and stands up on four feet, well-furred against the wind. The wind is only wind.

His nephew watches, gaping, one hand closing and unclosing. Perhaps Derek wishes to ask him something. The boy has been furtive of late, ducking away, slow to answer out of distraction instead of shyness. Were Peter and his sister not tearing at each other, perhaps it would matter.

But Peter does not care, does he? He sets his back to Derek and the rest, and then plunges out into the snow.

For a while he simply runs. His legs are sluggish with inactivity, the muscles stiff and stinging as they leap through drift after drift. He growls through the pain, till it sings instead of throbs, and throws his body in whatever direction catches his fancy. The footing is blind, uncertain; he saves himself more than once from a sudden pit or an unseen sharp edge, but the alarm spikes his blood with lightning, makes him dance across the empty, untouched ground. No one will help him but no one will hinder him.

He finds himself across the river, and then back again, crouching along the bridge that the Argents built, just under their cliffside fort. Like the fort, the bridge is all brute bulk, too heavy even for the snows to crush.

Someone keeps the middle lane of it swept. Peter waits in it for a while, sees no one, takes a walk down the lane and through the cluster of villages that have chosen to shelter there instead of with his own, and comes up to the bottom of the path to the fort’s front gate. All is empty, all is silent. A torch crackles here and there along the top of the fort’s walls, and a few windows gleam with light, but between the wind’s howl and the snow’s deadening, Peter thinks he could howl out the whole rage of his line and not be noticed.

He eventually turns away. His paws have begun to ache, them and the great muscles stretching over his shoulders and down his hips, and the bite of the wind has whittled at him. He returns to the bridge, crosses the river. A lone smoke spiral catches his eye and he climbs a small hillock to look, only to find the great chimney of his hall. His sister’s hall.

Peter climbs down again and pads aimlessly through the storm-iced trees, slipping about the occasional shattering shower of icicles. He lifts his head but all he smells is cold and dead wood.

A wicked gust of wind catches him unawares and nearly topples his feet from under him. He claws around to turn his back to it, goes sideways till he finds a temporary lull, and finds himself in a little copse. A fallen trunk stuck amid two still-standing ones breaks up the wind, while the leafless underbrush mixes with the snow to serve as wattle and daub. And there is a boy sitting in the copse, his back to the fallen tree, his red cloak spread under him as a blanket.

Peter pauses and Stiles turns a wide smile, even wider-spread, welcoming hands. The color of the boy’s ears and the tips of his fingers is healthy, and the roses in his cheeks seem from laughter, not cold.

“Mister wolf,” Stiles says. He gestures at the copse. “Not so much warmer, is it? But I suppose everyone must start from somewhere.”

The snow sprays into his face as Peter twists into the pocket. White flakes stick to his cheeks over the roses, as if someone has taken a knife and carved them out, and left only the laughing eyes and mouth behind.

He lifts his hand, touches the snow. He watches as Peter rolls over a man, just clear of the red square of cloth. It is strangely still where he is. Not warm, not cold, not anything. Only air.

“This is not my house any more than it is your woods,” Peter says. He dips only fingertips and nose into the odd patch around Stiles before wheeling away. The air comes in bitter freezing tears here, only broken and not dead from the fallen tree, but somehow it seems more complete.

It smells of _nothing_ where Stiles is, Peter thinks, and just then the scents of harvest fill the air. Burnt corn and crisp, winey apples, the sharp tang of leaves turned but not yet dead. Peter laughs and squats, and waves off the smell with his hand.

“Tricks, little fairy lord?” he says. “You must be lonely, if you have to resort to such bait.”

Stiles’ smile thins to nothing. The snow vanishes from his face as if it were never there, and when he cuts his hand from his face, the very wind above them seems to howl from a mortal wound. He has brown eyes, strange only because they are so plain for his kind, plain and unassuming, but for a moment they seem as amber-bright as any wolf on the hunt.

But then he smiles again. Smaller, diminished, and Peter finds himself slinking nearer, as if his body thinks it’s a frightened hare he’s found.

“I am lonely,” he says. He spreads his hand to the mountains rising at his back. “Well, mister wolf, can you expect much? No one comes to our lands anymore, not the men, not you and your wild kin, not even me. And if you find it cold here, it’s much more cold there.”

“What,” Peter says, half-disbelieving. The air near the boy is still—warmer, if only by comparison. He can brush up against the line where the wind and the cold drop away as if it were a gossamer veil hung between them, can and does, snaking back and forth with just his shoulder thrust forward. “What, with your eternal spring, your crystal castles, your gardens of jewels and wonders. And you find it cold?”

“It is cold.” Stiles tells him this as if Peter’s belief is irrelevant. Then he rises to his knees. He pauses as Peter leans back, then twists down onto his hands, as light as eiderdown.

He is dressed as any lord of these parts, layers and layers of silk and velvet and leather, but as he goes to hands and knees, his surcoat and undershirt gape open at the collar. He toes off his fine, fine shoes, delicate as a lady’s, then leaves his hose behind like shed skin from a shake. Stiles crawls forward, smiling, then coils over and back, mirroring Peter’s restless shifting. But on him it seems less impatient, less a matter of ill-suited skin and spirit. He is graceful, supple, as playful as he is quick.

“Cold,” he says, his face tracking Peter’s across the invisible line. Layer after layer slips from him, freed after a flowing turn of the hand, or an arching shrug of the shoulders. “Cold and the people are cold. We come out as rarely as you come in. It’s an old, old land, with blood so cold that it has turned not even to ice, Peter, but to something thick and sluggish. Something you can’t even break, because it yields to the blow like a rotten fruit. You could bring a mouthful of heart’s blood, still hot as life, and nothing would stir. Can you imagine that, Peter? Can you?”

And he crosses that line, slides his fine little hand too far. Peter seizes it, runs his clawed thumb up the trembling pulse of the underside of the wrist, then leaps at the boy.

They tumble back onto the cloak. It’s rich, soft, giving. Summerland stuff, like handfuls of clouds as Peter pins his catch, devours it whole. He licks at the long thighs, still lank with youth, leaves green and blue bruises up their gold-touched flanks. His own thighs are broader by a few fingers’ width now, if a touch shorter, hard and muscled with years of chase and counterchase. They serve as well as iron bars to close in the boy, keep him down while Peter tastes his throat and sweet mouth.

He fucks the boy, rough and fast. His cock leaves cloudy pink smears over the bruised thighs when he withdraws, and he plants himself upon palms and knees over Stiles for minutes after, his cheek flat to the gently dipping back between the shoulderblades, the tip of his dripping sex dragging back and forth between the ripe swells of the boy’s buttocks. When he lifts off the boy, he can see, smell, feel his marks. Raw, rasped skin where his stubble has rubbed—Peter licks at the place a last time, then rolls over to the side.

“I can imagine,” Peter says, and Stiles rises up on one arm beside him. He looks curious, the boy, strangely unruffled despite the state of his body. Peter pushes at him with the back of a forearm. “Your dead, lonely lands. I can imagine. I’ve seen them here, too.”

“Here,” Stiles says, as if Peter has made a joke. He sits up instead of lying down. His arms are encircled with bruises, wide bracelets only a hand wide each, but each hand nearly a third of his upper arm. He wears them as if they were chains of daises. “Oh, is that what you think?”

“You are very rude for one so longing for company.” Peter twists onto his hip, puts his hand out to nearly touch Stiles’ arm. His claws prick out and close that last whisper of a distance, and begin to etch lively scarlet lines into the pretty skin. “You would think, if you found someone who understood, who wished for the taste of blood as you do, who has had his own throw him away for—”

Stiles cups his hands around Peter’s face. He is tender, his fingers soft as petals. It is a lover’s caress but it is impossible, that he was there and now he is here, with not a puff of air in between, and then he dips and kisses Peter as Peter’s hackles are still rising. He tastes like fire, like ashes and like acid, like something that burns and burns and burns, and when he draws back Peter bites his lip instead of lashing out, for Peter is not at all sure that he should still have a lip.

“You think you’ve tasted it,” Stiles says so softly. “You think you’re alone. Well, you will know both. I’ll see you in your house, mister wolf, and we’ll see how you find it then.”

Then the boy is gone. Peter starts up, wild, every particle of him stiff. Not so wild that he will leap out at nothing, but he crouches there and strains to hear, see, smell, anything. He searches for anything, and has nothing, and the wind is blowing again, finally rattling its way through the fallen tree and the cloak slaps up against his knees—

He has the cloak. A red, fine thing, warm like a mother’s embrace, as light as a single breath. It slips through his fingers, even as his claws pierce it through and through. He shakes it, takes a step, and then shakes himself and gathers it up in his hands, twisting a bundle that the wolf’s jaws can bear.

The wind is up but the storm is finally dying. Here and there the clouds break, and although the breaks only show more grey clouds behind, they are no longer an impenetrable sea. The flakes are smaller, whirling upwards on the drafts as much as they are drawn downwards, and by the time Peter reaches the treeline they have diminished to nothing, leaving only the crystalline clearness of the cold evening air.

He can see yellow dots in the villages, only a few, but they will multiply, those torches. He paws at the snowbank, paces along the river. The fort rears up to his left, the river stretches before him, the mountains behind him.

In the end he returns to his sister’s hall. Not out of forgiveness, not from a change of heart, nothing of the sort. He stands in the doorway and someone brings him his clothes, and his sister stands at the hearth in the center of the hall and wraps her fur around her shoulders, watching him, and they both know they are grown now, no children, no promises but only stark truths.

Truths and blood. She is his sister, he is her brother. He will leave later, when he has what he wants of this place, and she will watch his back as he goes.

“You’re back!” Derek sets the planks to shaking with his galloping feet, his limbs flying, his eyes wide, as if he were a puppy again and not this almost-man, this one that Peter can see growing day by day into what was Peter’s place. “Uncle, uncle, there was someone up at the fort. A messenger from the south.”

“Oh?” Peter says. He shakes the last of the snow from his hair. The strands are already steaming, trapping dampness in the curls that coats his fingers when he combs through them. “Why were you up there?”

Derek starts. “I wasn’t,” he says. He hesitates. Something is there, Peter thinks absently, willfully pleasuring himself with the knowledge that he is resigning his sister and her alone to it. “I just—I heard it from someone. Who was there. They said there’s a great sickness taking over the lands, that it kills everyone it touches. That it’s coming closer, that there was a town just thirty miles from here—”

“Thirty miles and eternity,” Peter says, and then, when Derek cocks his head quizzically, he looks over his shoulder. The snow still stretches uncracked over the land, better than any lock on their doors. He stretches and something sidles down his side, and he claws at it before remembering.

Derek glances at the red cloak. He sniffs, then cocks his head again. When Peter slides the bundle into his shirt, Derek purses his lips, shuffles his foot, looks uncertain but is undeniably curious.

“If the disease is so bad, how is there someone left for a messenger?” Peter asks. He smiles at his nephew, clasps one hunched shoulder. “Where is this messenger now, anyway?”

“Resting in the village below the fort. Done in from the journey, he said—I mean, I heard,” Derek says. “He’s shut up in the inn, won’t see anyone now that he’s spoken.”

“So how do you know he’s still there?” Peter turns into the hall, nods at passersby as if he does not see the stares. “Oh, pardon, have you heard how _they_ know?”

“No,” Derek says slowly. “Peter…do you…can you…I wanted to…I met…”

Peter shoulders him off. “Well, go ask, why don’t you?” he says. “Though it’s nothing at all, I’d think. Travelers’ tales.”

The boy finally leaves, cowed out of his gossiping. Peter turns into his room, looks round it and all that it holds, all that it has held. He breathes in deeply, lingering in each familiar scent, and then he reaches out for the first of what he will need.

The cloak spills out from his shirt onto his bed, like a blot of blood. He pauses, then pushes it into the furs and turns around. He can hear his sister calling to the others, something about a letter from Lord Argent. He turns a deaf ear. If she insists, he supposes he will look into it; he will be here till the snow at least settles, at least till they can plow out the trading road, but that will be no more than a week at most. He cannot see how anything that happens during that week could matter to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actual wolf packs are generally made up of a mated pair and their offspring of various years' birth. So when a new alpha rises from within a pack, that usually results in a son killing his father.
> 
> The whole stealing babies and leaving changelings thing arises from the notion that the Fair Folk are a dying, inbred race (they need humans to mate with and have healthier children). Also, in a lot of the tales, there is the sense that as Christianity comes, the Fair Folk recede back into their hills in a kind of stasis.


	5. Silver Passant

His father is drunk. Sitting at the head of the table, failing body cocooned in ermine and velvet quilted with goose down, and the whole held up by that fantastic chair of horns and tusks and antlers, his savage throne made out of his kills. Quacks and real magic-workers cluster on him like flies on a rotting piece of meat. He pours out the best wine in the cellar for them as if it were water.

Chris still sits at his accustomed place, at the right hand of the empty chair that once held his mother, only two seats away from the circus, and he wishes again that it were a thousand. He eats but the meat turns his stomach, overstuffed with exotic spices as it is. The drink in his cup is the same allotment that was given to him at the start of the meal, though thirst is a wicked burn in his throat.

“So somber this evening, my son,” his father says.

He pretends to have not heard. He scrapes the sauce away to expose the thin, stringy meat beneath. They still eat well, up here behind their high walls. He knows that salted beef has been beyond most of the land for nearly a year now, that what few people are left alive would kill him to chew on his shoe leather alone. It still turns his appetite.

“Never mind him.” The girl, this Lady Martin, she sits amid the rest of the hangers-on like a queen among beetles, but still, she fawns and smiles at his father. “Have another cup, my lord? Wine keeps the blood warm, and you must keep warm. You’ve survived so much to be taken by a little chill now.”

His father smiles back at her, as if she were no more than pretty silk and jeweled girdle and creamy bosom. As if she could not strike a man dead with her low, coy voice alone, as sure as any dagger. As if they do not know what she is in truth, all of them, from the skulking hounds in the corner of the room to the quivering servants to the witches and wizards who now sup at his father’s table, who cling to the crumbs from his fingers but who give her a wide berth.

Chris pushes his plate away and stands.

“Where are you going?” his father says. He nods at Chris’ plate, still overflowing with the scraps of their stores and all the useless frippery the cooks and a desperate dying man can dress them with. “Dinner is not over.”

“I am done,” Chris says. He steps away from the table and then laughs dryly at the men who start in from the shadows.

He hardly knows a face of them these days. So many had died in the first terrible year, so many good, strong men, with careful eyes and even more careful minds. Quick to think, slow to strike but when they did, none rose from it. And dead, all of them, dead in their beds, raving, screaming, dead in their own pus and shit. These men, they are not the shadows of those before them, and he spurns them with a kick of his foot.

His chair goes clattering across the hall. A thin, snaking thing of a dog, some present from one of the witch doctors come to tend his father, leaps out of the way and then stands to snarl at him on legs as thin and brittle as dried grass. His father’s men scowl and lay their hands to knives and swords, and one fool, the neck of the bottle he’d been nursing. And not one of them will brave him, even with his hands empty, his sword absent from his belt.

“Christopher.” But his father has risen. Gnarled, shaking knuckles against the table, knocking aside the plates. Sauce drips to the floor and pools under his father’s boot. Another dog slithers between his father’s legs to lap at the spill, half a kingdom’s fortunes gone to the herbs and tinctures disappearing under that damned mongrel’s tongue. “Chris. The meal is not over. I am not done, my son, and am I not still lord here?”

“Yes,” Chris says softly. He watches triumph light his father’s eyes. Once, a very long once ago, he could set his pride by that light. He knows this; he does not remember it, not any longer. “Yes, you are lord. Lord of this rabble, the finest collection of stinking, greedy malcontents and frauds this side of Hell. That’s what you are, father. That’s what you’ve made of us.”

His father’s men cringe like the bootlickers they are. The fakes cringe as well; the true workers, the ones who consort with demons and steal babies in the night, they bare their teeth at Chris but they too hang back. The sky is black outside but in here, in this hall that has seen generation after generation beat back the dark, it is still too uncertain for them and they are cowards at heart, all of them. They will wait and watch till he falls.

And he will. He is not so much of a fool as to think his father is silent because the man listens to him. But he is not fallen yet, and he cannot keep his mouth shut and he cannot bring himself to shut his eyes. He is still in this hall and he, at least, still remembers what it was built upon.

“You are taken ill, my son,” his father finally says. The man looks grave, troubled. Sad, even, his withered hands slowly rising to clutch at the heavy, hammered-gold cross at his breast. “A bad cup of wine, perhaps.”

“I drink nothing but what you give me, even when it turns my stomach,” Chris snarls. He flicks his hand towards the full cup at his place. “We dine with men known to have murdered their children for power, with women who fuck with demons, with things that have more skins than the ones they happen to wear to this table. How does _your_ health persevere, father?”

“With the grace of God, and the wonderful knowledge that I have discovered, with the help of those I have invited here.” His father leans heavily to the side. The Lady Martin lends her arm, and he smiles at her as if she were his own grandchild, then returns to Chris. His voice trembles and despite himself Chris reaches for the knife at his belt. His father smiles at him as if he were the thing under the knife. “With the world turned upside-down, with the great death that has decimated these lands, we must conserve what we have. We will fight again, Chris, but first, we must live.”

“First, we must feed those who we would have driven out before,” Chris spits out. He stares at his father’s smile a moment longer, then turns on his heel.

No one stands in his way as he storms out of the hall. No one reaches out after him, no one even meets his eyes. There are still those who can see evil for evil, but they are frightened, hungry, half-mad with the burying of nearly everything and everyone that they know. They are as far from Chris as the ravening horde gathered around his father, and he would have sympathy for him if he had heart enough left for it.

As it stands, he thinks he buried even the ghost of his heart with his daughter. He has anger and bile left, enough to keep him stalking these polluted halls, but no more.

“You’re come early from dinner.” That boy, the so-called Lord Stilinski from the northeast, he leans out of a doorway. A pair of playing cards dangle from his fingers, a low fire flickers behind him. His undershirt hangs loosely from his frame, linen so fine that the yellow light shows the faint shadows of the limbs within it. “Is your father well?”

“You’d know better than I,” Chris snaps. 

He means to go on. His rooms are far from here, come down to a wintry closet no better than a servant’s rooms, but they are his own and none of his father’s lackeys will come near them and they give him access to the ramparts, where he can walk and look out at a land that is too frozen to turn putrid. But some demon keeps him. Perhaps it’s his father coming out in him; he nearly spits in the corner, and his fingers do move in the old, childish gesture, but he keeps his head up.

Stiles is what the boy likes to be called, as if anyone wishes to be so familiar with one so plainly without the church. He sees the movement of Chris’ hand and he smiles as if some kind memory touches him. “You do keep the old ways, don’t you?” he says. He turns up the cards, then curves them in a welcoming wave. “Come in, my lord. Cool your heels. Whatever your differences with your father, surely your roots run too deep to be so quickly forgotten.”

Chris puts his hand on his knife. “You think I’m a fool,” he says. “I should take cold and hot iron to you, and put out what’s left with blessed water.”

“Such an honored tradition,” Stiles says. He is too casual for a lord, too close. He speaks from a few feet away and somehow Chris feels as if he speaks right to the ear. He smiles again, playacting rueful, and then cocks his head as something stirs within the room.

A shaggy head pushes through the doorway. Waist-high, fur glossed back as if dressed with oils, with pricked ears and lolling tongue and long, yellow fangs. Stiles chuckles and drops his hand, curls his fingers in the massive ruff. Metal clinks and the wolf pulls up, closes its mouth, sits abruptly with stiff forelegs. Stiles raises his hand bewrapped with a thick chain of dull iron.

“Everything changes. We change,” he says. He twists his hand this way and that, and any way he turns it, the light seems to sink into the iron links, so crude and matte against his glowing skin, fresh white sleeve. “A taste for fire, for iron, yes, even in the old days, when we shied from it we still hungered for it. It’s like nothing else, isn’t it? The bite as it hits you.”

“The death as it takes you. Death takes all,” Chris says. “If you change, you cannot change away from that.”

Stiles lifts his brows. “Philosophical.” He retreats into the room and takes his wolf with him. Leaves a space for Chris to follow, into some charming nest of crackling hearth and simple, bright tapestries and an abandoned chess game. “Come in. Speak with me.”

Chris snorts but he lingers in the hall as if he’d drunk all the wine his father had offered. He thinks that he could kill the brat right now, right here. The bare touch of iron might not work but the boy watches Chris’ knife without watching it. He could at least take off the boy’s head, and have a chance to find out what will be the new trick.

“You think I’m a fool,” he says again. He nods to the wolf. “You think I don’t know what that is? _Who_ it is?”

“I think no such thing,” Stiles says. He stops by the chess game, touches the tip of one knight, then moves on. He has a small chamber; his companion, the Lady Martin, has taken the set once laid out for Chris’ wife. The bed is a few paces away, its coverings rumpled aside, a scatter of cards over its mattress.

Stiles looks over his shoulder at Chris. He sweeps the cards together in one hand, and with the other, he stoops and unlatches the chain from the wolf’s neck. It falls in a muted clatter against the heavy fur rug. The wolf draws back from it, looks at his master, and then arches and stretches its back, lips writhing away from teeth that could rend a man from gullet to groin in a heartbeat. Its ruff rises, showing a thick ring of silver about its neck, and then it stretches again, and twists back into a man.

Peter Hale settles onto his haunches, naked save for the silver collar. He brushes a hand through his hair, grips the nape of his neck briefly, and then lets his arms hang loose at his sides. He looks up at Stiles, quiet and calm, and at a gesture he slips up onto the bed and then curls into the piled blankets as if he still wore the skin of a wolf.

He is better and worse than when Chris had last seen him, staggering into the woods, hot blood steaming in the snow behind him. His eyes consider Chris clearly, so clearly Chris almost doubts recognition. He has fewer scars. He seems to welcome the hand that Stiles slings loosely over his neck, but his eyes are clear, not dull. Intelligent, not dazed or drugged, and yet he sits so placidly beneath that hand.

With his free hand, Stiles cuts and shuffles the cards against his thigh. He splays them in a half-circle over the bed, then scoops them to a deck again and reshuffles. Then he deals them out, a hand for himself, one for Chris. “A game,” he says. “A round. No more.”

“A game,” Chris echoes. He glances down the hall and sees no one. Then he steps into the room and pulls the door shut behind him. “A game, you think?”

“A folly, maybe.” Stiles turns a bright, charming smile up to him. “Your father marked him, too, but neither of you will say a word. So strange, you people are. A whole village of people, shut up in their hall and burned. They say you shot the ones who broke out with artillery bolts, even though the circle of mountain ash was unbroken.”

“I—” Chris starts. He feels the hilt of his knife cut into his palm. Peter watches him, still so serene, as if they speak of some other family, some other night. He swallows the bitter, biting bile rising in his gorge. “The bodies would need to be burned through and through, to keep the great death at bay.”

“But they weren’t dying from it,” Stiles says. He flips up his cards, considers them and frowns. Discards one and takes up another from the deck.

Chris pries his hand from his knife. “They could bring it to you. Three houses were well till the print of a wolf’s paw was found on their doors, and then they sickened and died within the day.”

“So you burned them,” Stiles says. His new hand seems to find favor with him. He lays the cards face-down on the bed.

“We did,” Chris says thickly. He swallows again. “Alive.”

“Your sister did.” Peter stirs in the blankets. His gaze is so steady, so unflinching. He was a wild, unbridled monster, straying beyond the bounds of wolf and man alike, and now he crouches like a lapdog. “You came after, when they were checking the ashes.”

Chris snorts. “It was our doing and I am—was the master of the hunt here. It doesn’t matter where I was or wasn’t.”

“Does it not?” Stiles says. He regards Chris for a moment, then slips his fingertips beneath his hand and tips over the cards. Then the other set.

The second set wins. Stiles shrugs, gathers the cards and deals again. This time he sets out three hands, one for himself, one for Chris, and one between them, well away from Peter.

Peter stirs again, lifts himself on his arms. He has power enough in that small motion to make Chris rest his hand back on his knife. The corners of his mouth pull back and up, the line of his teeth shows. His eyes gleam like the deepest ice in the lakes. “We had a fine time slaughtering each other, didn’t we, Chris?” he says softly. “Whenever you came, you came with your sword and your wolfsbane.”

“And you came with your claws and your teeth, and with anything else you could use. Crying children—”

“Children cried under your knives too,” Peter hisses. He’s up now, hands spreading apart on the bed, shoulders and back rippling with tension. “ _Your_ knives, your torches, whoever held them, didn’t you say—”

Chris laughs at him. It’s a choking, burning laugh, like ashes have smothered Chris’ breath, but he can’t bring himself to stop. “Yes, yes, I know. _I know_. We knew you were monsters, we thought you had brought another evil with you, but you all died and we kept dying after you, so we were wrong for that one, single evil among many. And we’re the monsters now, with my father sitting with that witch on his arm, selling what souls are left for his life, and we’ll be burned out in our turn. Is that it? Is it, Peter? Well, at least I will welcome my reckoning, while you cling to your life as the devil’s pet.”

Peter snarls and leaps at him. Chris jerks out his knife, throws his other hand behind him for the chair he knows is there.

The chair is not there and Chris stumbles into the wall instead, jarring his bones, losing his knife. Peter leaps but does not rise, and is instead a tangle of limbs on the floor by the bed, with a fierce red mark on his hip, and another about his neck, a second collar where the first has sunk into his flesh.

“The devil, you say?” Stiles holds up the chain. He slips the links through his fingers one by one, tilting his head this way and that, watching for something that never comes. Then he stands. He leans down and Peter twists around, stiff-jawed, shaking, leaning to and away from his leg. Peter looks up at the boy as if he hates him more than he ever did Chris, did Kate and the rest of Chris’ family, and as if he cannot stand to not see him. “The devil. Chris, you know better.”

He takes Peter’s chin in his hand and pulls it up towards his own. Peter’s lips writhe in a snarl that never comes. His eyes half-close as Stiles brings the chain near his face; he stills when the links touch his throat, shivers when they merely rub along his skin. He hitches when Stiles snaps the end, putting a fresh sore across one thigh, and then bows his head into the loose hem of Stiles’ shirt.

“And I wonder whether you would welcome it,” Stiles says. He sifts his fingers into Peter’s hair, begins pulling at it in long, loose strokes, just as Chris had once soothed his best hound. “You turn from priests, for all that you call upon God. You know better, my lord. Your family goes back before they called upon him. But do you know who you will meet at the end? That, I do wonder over.”

“Then wonder,” Chris says curtly. He pushes away from the wall and bends down to retrieve his knife.

He has to come close to them for it, so close that he gathers his elbows tight to his sides and still feels as if he rubs up against the heat of Peter’s body, bares his neck to Stiles’ gaze.

“Keep your virtue,” Peter says, and when Chris looks over, he is turned away, the back of his head greeting Chris. Dark curls and slender fingers tangled in them, and a shining silver collar. “Keep it, and keep pretending, and take it to your grave like a saint. Perhaps you’ll make it after all.”

“I never said I pretended,” Chris says. And he does. They’ve never met but in violence and hostility, even in more peaceful days. Japing, feinting at each other, when Chris was slipshod enough to let Peter get so close; he knew, back then, what the man was and how to treat him. At the length of a bowshot was best.

But hunters know what they hunt and he was—is—that. He sees the strength and the ferocity, the malicious beauty of a perfect gutting strike. The wild gush of heart’s blood out in the dirt. He’s run as far, as long, as fast, and stood after with legs shaking like a newborn fawn’s and a clawing, twisting hunger in his belly like no hunger he’s ever had at home, or between any four walls. He has seen the poetry in the desperate feats of men, in the overreach of a twisting arm, the eerie glow of eyes in the grey twilight.

He has been drunk, on wine and on other things. On hate, on frustration. He might forebear but he knows, as they say, what kind of man he is when he gets up in the morning, and when he gets up in the middle of the night, gasping and aching and wet between the legs.

“But I know what this is.” Chris slides his knife back into its sheath and rises to his feet. “A game, you said. I won’t play, my lord. Take what payment you will, but don’t waste my time.”

He steps towards the door. A soft, strange noise stops him. It sounds like the flutter of bird’s wings, but it has been so long since he’s seen anything but ravens. He turns without thinking and the upturned cards on the floor jeer him with their gaudy colors. The third hand, no man’s hand, and yet Chris draws back as if the dire fortune it tells is his own.

“Call me the Devil,” Stiles says. He retreats to his bed, carelessly pushes at the abandoned hands there. Caresses the wolf that now sits at his feet, lazy and half-asleep. “Call me your new names, if it lightens the yoke on your neck, my lord. But you’ll welcome nothing while your father lives.”

“Is that your game?” Chris demands.

Stiles looks up in surprise. Then he laughs, slings himself over on his side. His shoulder twists out of his shirt, and when his trailing arm drags on the collar, the wolf slithers up to wrap around him like a living fur, rough tongue leaving wet, reddened skin behind on that shoulder.

“Your father pays well,” he says, leaning back. He closes his eyes and puts both hands in the wolf’s ruff. “He’ll live. And you, my good sir, you will wait for him to die, and you will do it because the rest of your family did not wait for you and you do not have the will to follow after them, not while he lives. Perhaps not after his death, either.”

Chris wants to kill him. He lies there, wanton malice in the shape of pretty, living youth, and Chris wants to kill him.

Instead Chris leaves. He goes not to his rooms, but to the highest walls, the furthest he can rise without leaving the place, and he stands for a very long time in the cold and the dark, and feels no better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good manners back in the feudal days meant nobody ate till the lord started, and everybody stopped when he stopped (which sometimes meant you didn't get much, if he wasn't hungry).
> 
> The well-known Dead Man's Hand these days only dates back to Wild Bill Hickok, but they've been using playing cards to tell fortunes pretty much since playing cards were invented, so I bet some version of the ultimate unlucky hand has been kicking around for just as long. Granted, evidence of their use post-dates the Black Death by a couple decades, but records are scanty enough that I'm willing to assume they were in actual circulation well before they're ever mentioned.


	6. Blood Stain

This Count Whittemore, he travels in style. Oh, a single coachman and one carriage is a bit light, Kate will grant, but they’ve not gone beyond the next town before they pick up a handful of footmen and a fresh set of horses. The count wants to hurry onwards.

The count’s lady wishes to stay over. “It is late,” she says, feigning a yawn. “Late, and the roads are hard, and I am afraid of the robbers. Let us go in the morning, when there is light.”

He bridles and mutters and frets, but she wins out, and they settle into the best rooms of the local mayor’s house, hastily brushed up with extra bedding. The count strides into the bedroom, orders about the servants, complains about the smokiness of the fire. He strides out and takes the servants with him.

Kate seats herself at the windowsill. The alley behind is narrow, boxed in by the stables opposite, with no window pairing with the one at her back. She can drive in a straight line to the door, or sweep across to cover the rest of the room. She’s minded herself for long enough, and anyway, no matter what the silly girls think, it takes very little to keep up a nice face, a pretty silhouette. Clean water, a handful of soap, sunlight to dry the glints into her hair and a good long hunt to make her limbs lean and supple. She wears silk strips wrapped under well-worn leather, long since shaped to her body, and they do well enough to keep her breasts high and full.

The lady looks more frivolous. Her fur wrap might be sober black, but the dress beneath it is flaunting green, tight-fitted with trailing skirts. A king’s ransom drips from her girdle and is pinned to her breast, encircles her wrists and, when she lifts those skirts to change from boots to slippers, one slim ankle. More jewels wink and flash in her hair, as if the flame of it wasn’t enough fire for her.

“You’ve a rich man at your side,” Kate says. She smiles. Takes out her knife and a winter apple, browned and hard as ice on the outside. She begins to peel the fruit in one long strip. “Your count.”

“Jackson is very caring.” Lydia seats herself before a hulking, iron-bound chest. The servants had opened it before deserting her, so she needn’t sully her white little hands on the lock. She dips into it, something clicks, and then she sits back and begins to pluck the jewels from her hair. “He will let his wife want for nothing, will have her look like the queen of his house.”

Kate nods as she turns the apple. The knife is sharp and will bite her, if she allows it. She slides the edge along her finger, a wafer of peel all that lies between, and then shifts her hand away. “Whittemore. A good house, is it? South of here? It sounds like a southern name.”

“No, to the east, near the coast.” One waving red lock falls down the soft curve of Lydia’s neck, and then another. Her fingers weave in and out of her hair like sleek fish in the spring rushes. “Good, fertile land. But many of these are down to your father’s generosity.”

“Ah. I thought they were familiar.” A lie. Kate knows each and every one of them. She was never a pretty piece in a collection, for all that she likes the way men must look at her, but she knows her family and she knows what would have been her due. She was the daughter, after all. The golden girl, the heir.

The knife slips, cuts nearly through the strip of peel. She catches it before it catches her, and smiles as she sets it again to pale, slightly shriveled flesh. She has never wanted the whole Argent fortune, has never understood her brother, who seemed to want that and all of its follies as well. Kate is a hunter, not a lady. She will not stand back and crook her finger and let others leave under the pretense of following her orders. She will stand with them, before them, and it will be her knife first in, last out. It is worth all that she has lost, all that she has thrown aside, for that hot jumping spurt over her hands.

“Your father has an open hand,” Lydia says primly. She shakes her hands loose of her hair, leaves it hanging in a mass of scarlet silk about her shoulders. Her brooch comes off, set with the stones an emperor once paid Kate’s great-great-grandmother for ridding him of a curse. Then the bracelets, jingling with Russian rose gold, earned over the dead bodies of thirty packs. “He has been very good to us.”

“Oh?” Kate comes to the end of the apple. The single strip of peel drops from her fingers, just as the girdle unwinds from Lydia’s waist.

She steps over it, comes across the room and catches the ends of the girdle in her hands. Pulls it taut across Lydia’s front, winding the chain about her hands till they meet on the girl’s belly. Lydia straightens and her hair crushes back into Kate’s mouth and nose. She smells sweet, this girl, sweet and fresh, as if the whole countryside doesn’t reek of uncleaned corpses and broken men’s despair.

“Very good,” Lydia breathes, and then turns against the girdle so they face each other. She smiles slow, like syrup catching an unwary fly, and folds her hands before her, their knuckles just dusting under the buckle of Kate’s belt.

“And you were very good to him, weren’t you?” Kate says, just as slow, just as sweet. She tilts her head, nearly brushes her lips across the girl’s brow. She lifts the girdle, sliding the chain up Lydia’s back; it catches here and there on the dress, then frees at a tug. Lets it coil down to either side of Lydia’s throat, links pressing little florets of pink into the white skin, and turns her fists so they nudge up Lydia’s chin. “Very, very good, my little lady. And what did you do for him? Tell his fortune? Draw away the curses of his enemies? Or oh, I know, promised him another year of life? Was that it, little one? Did his jewels buy him a few precious more days to stew in that tomb of his?”

Lydia laughs. It’s girlish, soft, with no weight to it. “You know your father well, Lady Argent.”

“Don’t I,” Kate says, and then she jerks the chain forward. Jerks her head up at the same time, yes, so her lips press that smooth young forehead and so Lydia’s lips smother in her chest. She digs one hand into that mass of red hair and presses down, then pushes the girl away.

The girdle falls over the edge of the chest. Lydia falls against it as well, catching one hand over it, hair atumble, face flushed. She breathes in deeply, sharply, her breasts straining up against her dress, and her hand curls tight over the chest.

“What else did my father say?” Kate asks, turning away. She walks to the bed, flips aside the covers and runs her hand down the sheet, then checks it for small, biting things. Then she bends over and checks the other layers the same way, the thin down quilt, the much thicker hay-stuffed ticking beneath, the hard slats under it all. She looks for men and other means of death under the bed, then stands and puts her palms down flat on the mattress and pushes in. “Did he say how long he plans to live? Did he say my mother’s name—did he tell you something about how the women rule in our family, how he’s merely marking the days till he can hand over the family to its proper leader? Two generations he’s passed over now, does anyone still believe him? Well, I suppose my silly little niece.”

Lydia still leans against the chest. Her dress is looser, slipping off her shoulders at the top. She watches Kate with bright, almost fevered eyes, none of that ice maiden nonsense now. “Your niece is dead,” she says.

Kate looks at the bed. She is sad. She is, for a brief, sudden moment, remembering the little girl who had fumbled at Kate’s bow, who had danced when Kate had shaped one sized for her. It’s a cold stone in her chest where she had thought only dead ashes lay, and then she shakes herself and it slips out, and she feels only surprise. “My brother?”

“The great death,” Lydia tells her. With cocked head, sharper interest. “Her and her mother. I hear they were tending to the sick in the villages, against your father’s wishes.”

“Oh, well, then that’s to be expected.” Kate does not remember her brother’s wife being so charitable, but then, she can see very well that her father might drive a vagrant to charity. She lifts her hands and feels how quick the bedding rises to match them, and then smiles. “So, my father lives, of course. And so does Chris, and my father wishes me to kill my brother for him. Did he say why?”

Lydia is unbuttoning her sleeves. She collects the buttons as she goes, little pins headed with pearls from far India, brushing them away from skin just as silken and creamy. “Because your brother is a monster.”

“Oh, they’re all monsters, in the end.” Kate takes off her boots and her belt, sets a knife at the table by the bed where Lydia can see, slips another under the mattress when the girl cannot see. Then she flips herself onto the bed, sitting cross-legged like a man. “I meant did he say why he cannot do it himself?”

“Because he’s dying.” Lydia looks up, guileless wide eyes over a red bow of a mouth. “We have helped, as we can, but your brother struck him and the wound is beyond us.”

“Chris.” Then Kate closes her hands over her ankles, rocks in place. “My brother. He struck our father.”

She is surprised, but more than that, she is suddenly hurt, with a fierceness that takes her breath from her, that seems to boil out of nowhere. That is something old and deep and still bleeding afresh, down where she had forgotten it, but now the blood breaks through and this blood, this is unwelcome.

If she could, she would leave. This is not for this damned lady to see, not for anyone. But Kate is older, wiser, harder than the stupid girl who wept in her brother’s hands. She marks the interest in Lydia’s face so she does not leave, does not give way. Chris never saved her then, has no right to save her now, and she will no more let another dig at this familial pain than she would another try to heal it. However it hurts her, it is not _theirs_.

“He spent a day and a night in the woods, you said. And he struck my father.” Kate pulls up amusement and skepticism around her like an old blanket, and feels the wound sink back down where it belongs. It can bleed itself to death; she will live. “And my father is dying. Is my father a fool, now?”

“His wits seem healthy enough to me,” Lydia says, with a touch of drollness. She has her back to Kate, pulling something from the chest. A slippery, airy thing, that she folds over her arm, and then she unfastens her dress.

Kate laughs. Remembers her apple, stowed away while she played with Lydia’s jewels. She takes it out and rubs at the slight dampness it’s left in her pocket—so long stored, still with some juice, rather like her father—and takes a crunching bite. “He’s a werewolf, isn’t he? Don’t lie to me, girl, I know you’re something else. Whether it’s a witch in a lady’s clothes or one of those maenads come down from the hills, or something else, I suppose we’ll see, but you are that, or else my father in his old age would never bother with you.”

“He’s not a werewolf.” Lydia plucks at the silk here and there, where the tailoring is still snug enough to resist, and then skins herself from one dress to another. She’s all milk and dewy lily petals, with that fiery sway of hair at the top. “He’s dying, he’s something else, and your brother is—”

“Yes.” Kate takes another bite of the apple. “What _is_ my brother, my dear child?”

Lydia looks over her shoulder. It should be coy but it reminds Kate instead of the hawk turning its head, all keen eyes and features thrown into razor relief. Then she turns the rest of the way. Her night-dress swirls diaphanously around her, less fitting, more yielding. She takes a few steps towards the bed, then stops, her eyes lowered.

“If I’m such as you think,” she says.

“Then come to bed, my darling, and we’ll see whether it’s your maidenhood or your heart that I bloody the sheets with,” Kate says, grinning. She turns the core in her hand and chisels the last of the edible flesh from it, and then tosses it towards the window. “My father and I, we never disagreed on that. The things that we hunt, we hunt, whether in here or out there, and I won’t scream if you won’t.”

Lydia lifts her eyes. Her lips curve, and she seems as if she’ll speak. Then she pauses again. She stoops and picks up something from the floor: the apple peel. It twists and untwists in her hand, tracing endless arabesques.

“Did you want to know what it was?” she says as she carries it to the window. She takes up the discarded core as well, and daintily disposes of both outside before finally coming to the bed.

Kate raises her brow. “What it was?”

“What letter,” Lydia says. She curls into the bed like a cosseted pet, her hair spilling across the sheets to tickle Kate’s hip. One finger draws unreadable loops over the sheets. “If you want to know what will become of you, you let the peel fall, and the letter that it forms—”

“But I’ll not marry,” Kate says. She leans back against the headboard and straightens her legs. “I won’t, so it’s not a secret that death will be my bridegroom. So no, darling, keep your letters. And keep your count, will you? I want to know what’s happened to my brother, not meddle in some silly marriage for nothing.”

Lydia lolls onto her back and smiles with her teeth. “He’ll leave us alone,” she says, as her hand strays towards Kate’s knee. “And now, your brother.”

Kate looks at her, at the slope of her breast and the faint rise of her quim, the long flat belly, and then she laughs and shakes her head. “I’ve changed my mind,” she says. She reaches down and fists her hand in Lydia’s hair again, and draws the girl up. “I’ve not had news of him for six years now, and another day will not matter. Tell me after.”

And she has the girl then and there. Lydia is no maiden, with dry cunt, stiff limbs, and she isn’t a slattern or a whore either, letting the body do all the thinking. She lies under Kate with those fascinated eyes that never quite close, never quite lose themselves. Oh, her cunt gets wet enough, riding Kate’s fingers. She writhes and twists in the sheets, her hands snarled by them, good as any rope or bramble, and then grips Kate with sleek strong thighs, strong enough to hold Kate down to her sweet little mouth. She is a good mount, this girl-thing, well-exercised by someone, ready enough to turn at a nip, a pinch, a slap. The marks rise on her milk-skin like froth in a butter churn.

But she watches, always watches. When Kate finally claws away, gasping into the bed, unsteady on slicked legs, slick palms, Lydia turns onto her side and watches Kate and smiles with her bruised, bitten, half-swollen lips. It’s grown dark, the fire in the room burned low and the candles in the lanterns guttering, and the few beams of light that remain all burn in Lydia’s eyes, steady and cool like the icy, shimmering bands that burn in the northernmost skies.

“My brother,” Kate says. She reaches over and grips Lydia by the hair again. Pulls hard, so that the unwrinkled skin on the girl’s brow grows even more taut, the smiling lips twist further back. She will see the girl wince. “What is he?”

“I don’t know,” Lydia says softly. When Kate twists her fingers, she pulls her shoulders up and back, lets a trickle of air hiss over her pearled teeth, and it is pain. She feels it. And yet, she looks at Kate and Kate releases her, and the look in her eyes never changes. “No wolf, Lady Argent. He has sharp teeth but no claws. His eyes glow, but they are weaker, paler. They look like the night mist over a swamp. And he crossed a line of mountain ash as we do.”

“As _we_ do?” Kate half-forgets the girl, thinking of past hunts, remembered kills. But she is a hunter in the present, not merely the past. She curves her hand around one slim shoulder, her workmen’s nails and rough palm leaving reddened flesh in their wake.

Lydia nods ruefully. “This is the mortal world, man’s lands,” she says. She watches something else than Kate, somewhere far away and long gone, and her low voice trembles once. “We eat things grown in your soil, killed by your hands. We must, or else we could never stay, but it changes us.”

“One of the fair ones, my lady?” Kate says. She turns her head and looks at the iron bands on the chest, which Lydia had braved unmarked, and then turns back and laughs. “Well, a little lady, are we, not so grand and fine in your crystal hills, but still, I would call you fair.”

“I am pleased.” Lydia smiles with her watchful eyes, shivers with her frail body. She sighs when Kate wraps a fold of blanket about her shoulders, sighs and sinks close.

A pretty thing. They can bite. Kate holds her close enough to bite, true, but she is warm and she is so easy, with her throat so slender it needs but one hand to break. Perhaps that will be enough; perhaps it will not. But it would be so easy, with her this close, to find out, and Kate wants a run.

Her brother, then, first. And her father, perhaps. Kate will see the old man anyway, and she will not return but to bloody the place, she has said a thousand times over. And then, _then_ , Kate thinks, stroking the soft, long curls of red, and she smiles and turns to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The apple peel fortune-telling method is real, and is still common in some areas. More broadly, the custom of a woman divining her future husband's name is linked to celebrations of St. Andrew's Eve, which is _also_ connected with wolves and werewolves.
> 
> If you went to fairyland and you ate their food or drank their beverages, you'd be trapped with them and fooled by your illusions; if you didn't, you could go free. The tales don't directly show the inverse, but there are stories about fairies losing their youth and beauty once they step off their fairy horses on this side of the hills, and touch mortal earth.
> 
> Traditionally, the Fair Folk shrink from cold iron.
> 
> Crystal hills: yes, I've read Mary Stewart.


	7. Burnt Fur

Once there was a man who killed his niece. His blood kin, his girl who he had raised from little, blind, squeaking pup to something that strikes swift and sound in the night, and sure, always sure. Bears, monstrous grumbling things from far more savage days, have fallen at their feet, and men have shied from their very gaze. His fatherless girl, who had called him uncle and who had told him, in that strange certain way of children, that he would stand off any who would be fool enough to try and claim her for themselves, to take her away from them. Such a little girl then, and very little wolf, not understanding the way of their world over the way of the men around them, and yet, he had nodded and given her his hand.

He killed her with a slash to the throat, while in flight from her jaws at his flanks. He killed her in a lonely corner of the mountain, high enough that the men would not hunt after them there, barren and treeless and waterless. They were half-starved, thirsty, aching for lost members of their pack: the ones that might yet have fled the hunters’ latest traps, the ones that had died screaming in fire. He stood on legs still weak and scarred from a burning years hence, while she nursed a constellation of wounds from arrowheads and spear blades she had neither the time nor the life to fully heal.

Peter kills her because Laura wishes to stay only to find her brother, and then to flee further up the mountain. It is the heart of winter, and even to wolves the passes are uncrossable. And they know little of what lies on the other side, should they survive, except that the human lords there are known to the Argents and will listen to them. And they will die, damn her, but at least here they have their killers with them.

He kills her because she was not there when the torches and the pikes came. Dutiful little girl, out seeking her wayward brother, who had been meeting with his sweetheart up at the fort, and she had missed the terror of the whole valley coming against them. Weak, fearful, stupid fools, like crushing an eggshell to kill, not worth the effort. But together they are too many, even for those with the strength of wolves. They are too many, with their planks and hammers and nails, with their bags of wolfsbane scabbed up from the Argent stores, with their torches. With their fire.

He kills her because she was not there, and she was his sister’s daughter and his sister was there. Screaming, writhing, blood on her claws and in her mouth, fighting to the end. Talia fell beside him, at his uncovered flanks, his _sister_ , and Talia was all his and Laura was ever only half Peter’s at most. He looks in Laura’s face and he sees Talia’s mouth and nose, and then he sees the gaping, burnt holes where a villager had speared out the eyes with a smoldering pole, half-crushed under the fallen beam that had finally broken the mountain ash line.

He kills her because she kept him alive when she and her stupid, gullible, guilty brother had found his charred, shivering body in the woods. Trapped in an airless, light-less den, smothered in sheets that would sop up the fluids running from his broken skin and then hold no more, so he stewed in his own rot. Drank it when they were too long away, lapped at that noxious pool like a man at a desert oasis. Ate the chewed mush they spat out by his head, more than crazed, starving and in pain and so alone in his prison den. Was it any wonder that when he could walk, when he could claw out of that pit in the woods, he would make straight back for the villages? For those little houses with their doors and their windows and their owners who have slaughtered everything he holds dear?

It does not matter to Peter that half of them are dying, that they stink themselves, covered in pus-filled buboes, and the other half are dead, stiff corpses wrenched about in agony on the floor, in the privy, over the table. Fire can hurt him but not this sending from Hell, not this disease that strikes anyone, anywhere. He will have their death before he lets any sickness take it, and if he is too late, he will still have it out with their damned corpse.

He kills Laura because they will not kill him. Talia would not kill him, not when he and she both knew he would leave and would continue in his ways where men would see and hear and tell of it, and her children will not kill him. Cannot. Laura tries and fails, and when Derek finally straggles after them, he stares at his dead sister and leaves one score across Peter’s shoulders, and then tumbles over a cliff bleeding from a half-score of wounds while Peter stands and screams his rage and his grief to the mountain.

The scream rings over and over around him, spiraling until he doesn’t recognize it, thin, pitiful, sobbing thing that it is. He falls back and stares at the snow-drenched range and wonders who would make such a sound, as if they’re carving out their own heart. 

Not him. His limbs still shake but it is the shake of strength, so fresh and sudden that his body cannot contain itself. He paces back and forth, feeling the spring in his step, the ease with which his muscles stretch and clench. Peter touches his face, then runs his hand over it again, marveling at how smooth, how unscarred it feels. How nothing hurts.

He howls again, a single, plain note that cuts straight across the valley with no deceiving echoes. It is one howl but he can make a new pack by dawn. One that will heed him, that will not skulk and whimper in the shadows, that will help him cut hamstrings and tear throats until everyone along the river is dead, until that great sore of a fort lies empty and the name Argent dies a slow, choking death in the mud.

Peter drops to four feet, lifts his head and lets his tail swing. He dashes the snow from his paws, then runs down the mountainside.

At nightfall he reaches the edge of the first village. It is a shabby thing, little more than a few shacks that are half-engulfed by the snowdrifts, although it has been a week since the last snowfall. He goes in the first and finds no one. In the second, a baby is frozen in its dead mother’s arms, and in the third, a man has hacked off another man’s leg, and both lie dead across from a woman who stares lifelessly at the ceiling while ripples stir across her swollen belly. But Peter’s nose tells him that it is a fraud, that nothing lies within her body but lively rot.

He goes to the next village, and the next and the next. Once he does find someone still alive, a girl who sobs so loudly for the saints that he can barely make himself heard. He promises her life, protection from the great death. He works hard for her, cleans the blood from his teeth and hands and pitches his voice soft and soothing. She calls him the devil and the tempter and then hell, but eventually she cannot resist the pulse that beats so urgently in her veins, and she comes crawling out.

She is covered in buboes, and dies at his feet, her eyes still pleading for salvation. He does not even stoop; the great sickness will not touch wolves, but they cannot heal it either. He steps over her outstretched hand and goes onto the next village.

All along the river, no one is left alive. Sickness or violence, or despair: more than once he finds women and men and even children hanging from the rafters. He searches and seeks, but until he turns his feet towards the path to the fort, he finds no one.

Peter does not go up to the gate, as he has in the past. He looks at the high, thick walls, with the guards small as ants atop it, each armed with torch and bow. He smells the smoke coming out of it, full of roasted meat and spice, far from the greasy, sickening smell of his burnt family, and he hears the snatches of music and voices drifting in the wind, and for a moment he thinks he can feel the flesh rending under his claws, can will it into being.

But he is outside those walls, empty-handed and the sole living among the dead.

Stiles finds him crouching in the cinders where his family’s hall had once stood. Nothing else is left, not a timber or a scrap of bone. It is flat and bare, a black, crunching stretch of land with a few piles of stone at the edges. The piles are not graves. At the top each is mounted with a wrought-iron cross, and at the base is ringed with mountain ash trenched inches thick into the ground, and in the middle, where the unwary eye cannot miss it, the symbols of the excommunicate are marked with bloody paint.

“I’m here, mister wolf,” he says, and Peter looks up.

The world is black and white and he is red. Red from the lurid glint of dusk in his hair, the gay scarlet of his clothes, the fresh splashes of blood on his boots. He is dressed for a fair, this pretty lord, dressed to laugh and dance and make merry, and he stands on the deaths of Peter’s kin.

Peter sweeps one leg back, slides the other forward. He feels his back broaden with masses of new muscle, drops his jaw for fangs that could punch through a man’s skull. He likes the boy for a moment. Likes him for his strange, fleeting warmth in past days, likes him for his daring. Likes him for the second thrumming pulse, so heavy and hot in the still, frigid air. Likes him for the white, white throat and the flicker of life and the chance of a death not Peter’s own.

He wants to kill him.

The cinders spray out from Peter’s scrabbling feet as he lands, blotching the paper-perfect snow beyond. Peter wheels even as his weight settles, dragging his nose about for the scent. He smells the sharp breath of excitement, hears a pebble fall. A shiver of red crosses his gaze.

He leaps again, across the burnt circle and between the warning cairns. A small rockfall bruises his flanks and he kicks away a stone, snarls at the flecks of red paint it leaves on his claws. He twists and turns and sees Stiles’ fleeing back a few yards away, well within his reach. Smiles, and lunges.

But his teeth close on nothing. His claws fling up but gobbets of dirty snow. Peter snarls and something whips across his left haunch, light and quick as a bird’s wing. He whirls and strikes out. Finds himself half-buried in a drift, snow crunching up to his breast.

He hurls himself free and drags his hands over himself. His skin tears and blood mats his fur before the wounds heal over. It steams in his nose, and he feels a hot mist rise around his heaving shoulders. He charges around one cairn before catching himself, seeing the deep gash through the line of mountain ash, and scaling its side, knocking away the cross at the top.

The place is clear. He sees no one. When he turns, he sees no one, and when he turns again, he sees no one. His heart is the only one that beats, and his breath and his blood is all that he smells.

Peter rips at the stones under his paws. They rock and begin to slide, and the cement, new-laid in a cracking cold, gives way beneath him, but he does not care. He kicks and lashes out, leaping clear whenever the stones threaten to carry him with them. Then comes cracking down again, as he’s come down on countless breaking spines.

The stones do not break. They tumble and they scatter, and then they and he are level with the ground again and he is _still_ —

He sees the dull line and turns his head. The rod catches him under the jaw, across the side of the skull. It scores an angry slash under his ear and then he’s scrabbling backwards, bowled half-over by the blow. His back paw catches in the dirt and he throws his weight onto all four, rears his head, opens his jaws and pain explodes through his mouth and down his muzzle. Blood instead of a snarl spits from him.

Stiles stands in front of him. The air is chill enough to draw thin plates of rime along the edges of the river, even if the middle stubbornly pours on, but Stiles is bare-handed, his fingers pink and glowing against the dead grey of the iron cross. He looks at Peter, then at the cross. One of the arms is bent almost to snapping.

Carelessly, like a loitering boy, he tips the cross to the ground and snags the bent arm against a rock. He twists and lifts, turns the cross and twists again, and the cross is a straight, pointed rod.

“I’m here,” he says, and he steps forward. He swings the rod as if it were a willow switch. “Here in your house.”

Peter snarls with blood dripping down his chin. He jerks his head up, splays his arms, and falls onto his rear legs, man enough for speech, wolf enough for murder. “This is not my house.”

Stiles looks around him. He pauses, and then turns and looks behind him, the rod dropping to point at the ground. Then he looks back at Peter. He is bright and cheerful, with his smile like shards of ice. “Isn’t it, mister wolf?”

“I’ll—” And Peter lunges. Flays the skin off his human palms on the rough cinders, for nothing.

He turns and they are the same distance apart. The rod still points downward, Stiles still smiles. “You’re different than when I last saw you,” he says. He lifts two fingers, makes a vee of them and curves them towards his own eyes. They flare red, then simmer to that lying, smiling brown. “You’re what you deserve, isn’t that what you said?”

“It is _not_ ,” Peter snaps. He rakes his claws through the ground, inches deep, and all the dirt turns up burnt. “It is not, damn your twisted tongue, damn you, and damn your words. It is not, this is not, none of this is my doing, and _damn_ your prophecies.”

He hurtles forward, not at Stiles but to the side, for a feint that will be a slash to gut from behind at the end. But he strikes thin air again and they circle out to the center of the charred space. Snow trails after Peter, melting in his furious wake, mixing with ash to make thick grey mud.

“Damn you, did you see them? Did you see them coming?” Peter shouts. He paws at the ground, drags his hands over his legs, only broadens the muddy smears on his skin. “Did you see them, their torches? Were you there? Did you see us burn? You slept here, you ungrateful wretch! We fed you, we let you into our beds—”

“Your beds. Your house.” Stiles idly swings the rod from his hand, then flips his grip and stabs the end into the ground. He leans his palm over the top, rocking it, petting it, and then he sinks lightly down. He sits amid the mud, the cinders, as indelibly red as a wounded heart. “I did not see them come for you. I did not see you burn. I saw you when you saw me, Peter. I saw the blood in your eyes and the death in your hands and the hunger that would lead you, no matter the path. That is all.”

Peter laughs savagely. He’s come down as well, crouched back on his heels, his fingers gouging the earth. “You’re lying.”

“You were kind to us, when we were here,” Stiles says. He tips his head and looks down at his hand. His fingers flutter through the cinders and flick up black dust that never speckles his clothes or his hand. Then he looks up and he is not smiling. “You were kind. We are not kind. You provided us with bed and welcome, and in return we sported a while with you. It is not kind or fair or just, it is simply what we had and what you cared to take.”

“What we cared,” Peter chokes. He laughs again, but he is still short of breath. His anger is waning in this chill, ashen ground. Even in that terrible, fetid, pain-wracked den, he could smell life and here he scents nothing. Then he lifts his head. “My sister. Your girl, she laid with—”

“Lydia is not here.” Stiles tips his head the other way. He is still solemn but he hardens like ice in the deepest chill of the night, growing clearer and clearer, nothing hidden yet no warning for its sharp, slick edges. “Your sister is not here.”

Peter flings a handful of cinders at him. Somehow they fall short, scattering like birdseed before his crossed legs. Then Peter rises again. If anger will not carry his legs, then sheer refusal will; Peter will not bow to this _boy_ , this capricious fey lord. No matter the years behind that smooth-cheeked face, the riches and the power under those soft hands, he is not in his own land and Peter will not yield his.

“You are here,” Peter says. He lashes back and forth across the scorched earth. Grey mud mounds up over his bare feet, sends whipping tendrils around his ankles. “I am here, so you are here.”

“We are not kind,” Stiles says. He smiles again. He feels warm—he is yards away, farther than when they met in the woods, but he is warm and Peter can feel it across the space, like a beckoning hand. “But we have hearts, and blood that runs through them. I can still see the blood in your eyes, mister wolf.”

“I can see the hunger in yours,” Peter says back. He stalks the grasping fingers of that warmth, weaving around them, letting them tease and clutch before he tears away. He does not need that warmth. He will not need it. “You’ll have me to heel, will you?”

“You want death.” Stiles lifts his fingers from the ground and examines them. They are clean but he rubs his thumb over the tips, then rubs his palm over his knee. His eyes are clear and calm and cold. “Not like others want it, not like a rescue or an end or an interruption. Like something that you can squeeze around you, feel spilling out of your hands, like a whole life boiled down to what you let drip between your jaws.”

“You’re a hunter, just like those rats hidden up there.” Peter flings his hand at the squatting fort on the cliff. “You sit and you think about how I would look, stuffed and mounted, like that will make your courage rise behind safe, thick walls.”

“You want kindness, too,” Stiles says. “Not a soft heart, an open hand, a willing mind. Those are too weak for you, they would shred in your claws and you would despise them for it. But you want kindness, the kindness that sees your deeds and your misdeeds and finds the common hunger, that meets your eye over your worst wrongs, that stands when you fall. That will dip a hand, and hold it up for you.”

A finger of warmth draws down Peter’s back. He snarls, tears it away and feels the blood drip down his nape as he twists away. He stalks to the edge of the burnt circle, smears the ashes into the pristine snow. “You give me nothing,” he says without turning.

“And then you want blood,” Stiles says thoughtfully.

The warmth vanishes. Peter thinks he was standing in the cold already, meant to be, but he shivers and then he whirls about. “You have none,” he growls. “Ice-water, dead flesh, hiding in your hills.”

But Stiles is on his feet too. He stands amid the flat black plain, scarlet so strong it gashes Peter’s eyes. They sting; Peter closes them, opens them, and the air seems to waver in a heat that is not there as Stiles holds out his hands. 

His fingers are closed. He opens them, slowly turns over his hand. The blood snakes between his fingers and paints lacework over the backs of his hands. It rises around his boots.

Peter can smell it. Taste it, so thick and hot and fresh, it makes him ache. His hands work, his jaw itches to drop open and just swallow. He hates the boy, hates him more than anything, and over the red, red pool of blood, Stiles smiles.

“You want these things,” Stiles says, as Peter steps back, shaking. “You will always want them. I’ll give you nothing you do not come to me for.”

Peter turns and runs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the stuff I describe Peter seeing in the abandoned houses? Actually tame compared to what contemporary writers describe as occurring during the actual Black Death.
> 
> Derek is dead.


	8. Silver Dormant

His father wants to kill a girl.

She is a witch many times over. She has bragged of slitting infants’ throats and drinking potions made from their blood, she has fornicated within Chris’ sight with beasts for the express purpose of pleasing the demon she calls a master. She has performed a thousand lesser cruelties, arrogant, sure of her place at his father’s table, missing no chance to degrade and debase anyone and anything that crosses her path.

But she is innocent of the crime for which his father wishes to kill her, for it is no crime but another damned spell. A ritual described by a rival, which promises to not only keep the great death from his father’s flesh, but to also make it smooth and firm and young again. A sacrifice, which must be a young woman, born on the feast-day of Saint Ursula, with hair as dark as the winter earth and skin as white as spring milk. This girl.

She is reprehensible but they will tie her down and rape her over the altar and cut open her womb, and mix some terrible drink in its gaping wound. When Chris finds her, locked in the same kennel where they had once kept his best tracking hound, she is whimpering and naked and she looks, for a moment, like his daughter.

He cannot take her out, not before they are discovered, so he gathers her in his arms, and when she is limp with relief he breaks her neck and then cuts her throat to be sure. His father finds him sitting by her corpse, cleaning his knife with a kitchen rag.

“You have ruined my chance,” his father says.

“You are as ruined as anyone can be, and still not be in Hell,” Chris says.

The blow takes him by surprise. It should not; he has felt his father’s anger before, with fists and belt when they were younger, and with the iron-spined cane that his father leans on now. But it does. Perhaps because his father seems truly distraught, as if this one girl were the only girl in the world whose misery could save him. Chris is no fool, knows very well by now that every person he sends beyond his father’s reach is merely a trade for two more whom he cannot save, and he expects anger, disgust, petty frustration, but not desperation.

He lashes out. His knife leaves a long scratch on his father’s boot. Not so deep that it could not be buffed away. He is sullen, overtaxed, half-crazed himself, but he is not—it is his _father_ , even if his father is now a monster.

He is not aiming. His father is, and rains down blow upon blow even as men rush in and seize Chris with the eagerness of mongrels invited to torment their betters. They throw Chris against the wall, twist away the knife. He sends four sprawling limp, and a fifth who will not live to see more than a handful of days, but the rest overwhelm him and then his father’s cane catches him on the back of the head.

Chris wakes in the kennel. His head is bruised and clotted with blood over the back and sides, and his ribs clench like red hot bands of iron with every breath. He knows his ankle is broken, thinks a knee is at the very least wrenched, and his fingers look as if someone has carefully crimped each joint. He cannot consider how they feel because he will pass out.

Some moldy hay sticks to his scabs. He has but rags of a shirt left to him, but the hounds are—were—as prized members of the family as they were tools more essential than bow and arrow. It is cool here, not cold, the walls snug against drafts, and he shivers instead of freezes. 

A bowl of water sits near the front of the kennel, just before the bars, with a hunk of dense black bread soaking in it. He drags himself on the arm that hurts the least till he reaches the bowl, and dips a finger in it and then touches his lips.

“Do you think your father would waste his precious cures on you?” Peter Hale sits by the cage. He is dressed, in finer linen and velvet than his station had ever commanded or his lifestyle had ever tolerated, and he toys with a piece of red string. His collar is heavy silver, a smooth circle with no catch that Chris can see, and rises well clear of his shirt. “Wake up, Christopher. He’s long lost to you.”

“I am awake.” Chris tries to lift himself above the rim of the bowl. He fails, sharp hot spikes of pain piercing his bones. He breathes low and heavy, blinking away false stars, and then shoulders himself against the bars and pushes up and this time he manages to suck at the water. “I think. You’ll forgive me if I hesitate. The sight of you can’t help but make me doubt.”

Peter glances into the cage. He has his back to the empty kennel beside it and the bars creak as he moves. Then he smiles, gentle acknowledgement, and over that smile stares cold death. He touches the collar. “Yes, I suppose.”

“You look well.” The bowl rocks under Chris’ chin, spills water along the blood dried to his jaw. He closes his eyes, then opens them. Shifts against the bars and cranes his head to drink again. “A firm hand suits you, does it. That would have saved us all some trouble, if it’d come earlier.”

“Are you volunteering?” Peter says. He moves his hands together, then draws them apart. The red string flicks and twists between them, making loops that pull into knots and then spring separate and straight. “Maybe in your younger days, when you almost had some daring. And then you’d find your way from my bed to my sister’s ear, and speak to us about abandoning the ways of twice the generations since your filthy poacher of a founder, and we would all come tame to your hand as your father and your sister shot us down.”

He stills when Chris laughs. It hurts. Shakes the broken ribs, rakes over the throat, parched even with this paltry bowl of water. Chris shakes against the bars, then lets himself sink down to curl around his broken limbs. “We would have killed each other even if my father had fallen for your mother, and doves had flown over their wedding bed,” Chris says. “I am awake. I’ve never fallen asleep, Hale, that is why I’m lying here now. But I wonder why you sit here, down with the bitches when your master dreams so high.”

Peter glances at him. “You think he dreams?”

“He’s here for this place, isn’t he, him and the lady?” A broken straw scratches at Chris’ neck. He moves his head and two prick him. He moves back, and waits till his trembling and his sweat have softened the straw. “Sees the river that never freezes over, the forest on one side, the farmland on the other. Like your family, like mine. It’s beautiful.”

“You’ve been behind these walls too long.” Peter twirls his string around his thumb, pulls it tight, till the thread hides itself in his flesh, and then unwinds it. He tips a jaundiced eye at Chris. “I knew that, but it’s another thing to see it.”

“You’re right.” Chris feels the start more than sees it. He wants to laugh again but settles for a shrug that pains him anyway. “You are. You are also a malicious murderer, who didn’t need a wolf’s claws or a sister’s death to send innocents to their graves, but the one does not prevent the other. I am going to be killed by my father, Hale, and I should have killed him years ago but I don’t have the heart for it. If I had yours, I could do it, but I do not, so more will die after me. So let us not pretend to be what we are not.”

“You are raving a little, I think.” Peter turns and slips his hand through the bars. He smiles without his teeth showing, when Chris stills, and then puts the backs of his fingers to Chris’ brow. Then he takes back his hand. “I never killed my father.”

Chris snorts. Something tears dully in his chest and his breath comes short. He tastes fresh blood but none comes so far as his mouth.

“I could have, if it had come to it, I suppose,” Peter says. He rolls back against the other cage. His feet slip a little and Chris hears the grate of his collar over iron bars. “Do _you_ want this land? If your father died, would you keep the fort, then? Clean out the riffraff, bring in the good folk, watch it bloom again like a wise, benevolent lord?”

“You will not kill him.” Chris swallows thickly. There is nothing in his throat but still, it sticks. “Neither will your master. Pull me up against the bars and beat me for your dead, but they will stay dead as much as my father will outlive me.”

“You will not even try, even in a dream?” Peter asks. His voice lilts, it mocks but the sting is strangely dulled. He plays with his string a moment more, then unsheathes his claws and snaps the taut threads into a dozen fragments. “You could have been lord, you remember that.”

“I am not fit for it now, I know that,” Chris says. He pushes at the bowl, then rolls his head into the place where it had sat. “What are you here for, Peter? If your master wants a puppet, he would do better with my father. If you want a toy, you may play but I may die on you.”

Something touches his hair. He thinks he imagines it, and then the touch deepens, from a ruffling draft to sure, firm fingers. They slide down the back of his head even as he twists from them, ruthless over the swollen ridge. The pressure makes Chris arch and cry out and shake in agony, and when the white clears from his eyes, he finds himself looking at Peter.

The man crouches in front of his cage, cradling Chris’ skull against a broad palm. His eyes glow like the heart of a frozen lake. He pulls his lips back from his teeth and he looks angry, he looks bitter, he looks scornful. He looks hungry.

“I came because I can kill you,” Peter says. He digs his nails in at the edges of Chris’ wounds, so the bruised flesh pushes into the most swollen part and so Chris gasps. “If you wish. I can kill you. Your father won’t, you know. You’re his child.”

Chris shakes his head but the hand on it will not release him. He shakes it again, forces his arm under himself and it might render him half-conscious but he falls free against the side of the kennel. “That means nothing to him,” he says. “His life is all that matters.”

“It means you can do something for his life,” Peter tells him, slow and sure. He folds his fingers in and looks them over. Cleans flakes of blood out from under their nails with his thumbnail. “You’re his blood and he has precious little of it these days, with all the blood of others he pours into his wine. You will die, you are right, and he will live, and you will help him do that.”

“You’re a liar.” Chris stifles a broken laugh at the way Peter looks at him, as if they have any trust between them to break. “I mean that you say these things, but you say them as if you mean nothing else. As if you would help me. I know what I’ve done to you. As if your master would let you help me.”

“My master wishes that you would think it over,” Peter says. He raises his brows and then pulls his arm out of the cage so he can gesture in acknowledgement, down on his elbows and knees. He is a graceful man, this unforgiving killer. “Truth for truth, and he is my master, that is the truth.”

Chris looks at the collar. It is a fine thing, perfect and round as if it had been poured about the man’s neck. And weighty, with thin red lines above and below it.

“Is life worth that to you?” he says slowly. “I didn’t think it of you.”

Peter smiles. He folds one hand over the other, lounges on his arms, more wolf than man for all that the teeth he shows are square and blunt. “Is death so far above you?” he says. “I didn’t think your pride so frail.”

“Stop,” Chris says. He hitches against the wall. His wounds throb, his head swims. Maybe a fever will take him. Then he thinks of Victoria, bloated and burning, and of his daughter, her pus-streaked hand in his unmarked one. He shudders and his head goes back, unthinking, seeking clearer air. “Stop. You wouldn’t kill me.”

“I would.” Peter sighs. “I will, if you only ask. I hate you, Chris, I hate the reek of my dead family on your hands, I hate how I see your father’s pride still in your eyes. I would hunt you down and rip you from gullet down if I could, but you are shut up in here and I must take the kill where I can find it. But you have to ask.”

“Stop,” Chris says again. He looks at the man, at the collar, and some last thread of strength makes him bare his teeth. “I will not ask anything of you. If you had come to me in the woods, if you had ever had stood it till the last and met me straight on, then we could have seen. But you did not and I will not beg the scraps of your scraps now.”

Peter smiles again. His shoulders roll, straining his fine clothes. He is brute violence thrown over with velvet for a moment. The stones scrape under his claws. “You beg now,” he says. “You beg and you don’t know it, and you will be unlucky enough to come to know it. You think I wear this collar from fear and greed, like your father wears his sins. I have a _master_ , and at least I know it. But I think you believe you’ve always been free, don’t you? The more fool you.”

Then Peter stands. Red dances about his feet, but for a moment only; the shreds of string roll into the dirt under his boots and grime over brown and grey. He taps the door of Chris’ kennel so the bars tremble, then moves away.

He goes one, two steps to the door, then slips soundlessly to a wolf that slinks and curls about two legs. Stiles looks at Chris from the doorway, leaning against one side.

“It seems familiar to you, this place,” Stiles says. He plays his fingers carelessly over Peter’s head and down the long snout, so near the bone-breaking jaws. “Your father will give you a trial, he says. A fair hearing, even for a man who strikes at his rightful lord, and then, if you are found guilty, he will not stain his hands with his own blood but will chain you out in the woods for God or the Devil to take, whichever cares to come first.”

Chris laughs roughly, even as the walls of the cage seem to close up about his throat. He sees, suddenly, the meaning of it all. “There’ll be neither, will there? I know, my lord, I know. In here is my father’s house and you are merely a guest but out there, who is there? The people are dead, the land is dead, even the wolves—”

He stops. At Stiles’ feet the wolf sits up, ears pricked, but Stiles sighs and the wolf settles back.

“The wolves are gone,” Stiles says. He strokes his hand slowly through dense, glossy fur. “Even the wolves, yes. They hunted you and you hunted them, and now no one will hunt but people will still die.”

“You?” Chris says.

“I will be in the woods, as I have told your father,” Stiles tells him. Then he looks slowly about the room again, his eyes lingering as if all is new to him. “Familiar to you, but it suits you poorly. Well, we will see. You will think, won’t you? I like you, my lord. You guard so closely, even when nothing remains to guard.”

Chris bridles, even as his body groans. He looks to the right of Stiles, where the hand curls loosely against one hip. “You like me on the other side, I think.”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Stiles says. “To everything its place, and you do not lie where wolves lie, do you?”

Then he turns and he leaves Chris, taking the wolf with him. His steps fade away and the door swings shut. In the cold and in the dark Chris lets his shattered body slump. He wishes for his wife, his daughter. He wishes for a knife, but when he thinks of it he thinks of his father’s cold stone heart, lying on the broad oaken desk that has passed from generation to generation, and that will now pass to no one but a corrupted old man.

He thinks he could kill his father now, if he had the strength and the means. Truth for truth, he does not have Peter’s heart but he does not have his own anymore either. He has this sickness that will not kill him, this thing that has slithered in his chest since his father first closed the gates to the world, but that has not raised its head till now, pushing boldly through the splintering remains of his pride and his honor and his, yes, fear. He had feared his father but no longer.

He thinks Peter was wrong, that he has always known a hand on his leash. All men have one, whether it be God, the Devil, or something of this earth. Someone else, someone loving or hating. Something inside, lust or fear or desperation or compassion. But there is a hand, and a leash. The only one with a knife is death.

And he thinks, oh, he thinks even though he does not want to think, he thinks that he misses most the clear, open air. His family is dead in the earth, down deep where he cannot go, where he does not _want_ to go. He does not believe in God anymore, or an afterlife; he believes that they will rest peacefully where they are but as for himself, oh, he has long since put aside such wishes. Cannot imagine them any longer; he is so twisted and low that no part of him fits them, will even tolerate them. He is something else, something that shudders in this cramped little hole and thinks not of a warm fire, a welcoming home, but of the woods where he had last run, blood hot in his veins, cold air on his face. 

He wants only to raise his head and breathe again. And the leash on him, if he can have that one last time, it matters very little. It is only what he has always has, he thinks as they come for him in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Saint Ursula is one of those virgin martyrs.
> 
> All that witchery stuff Chris mentions is taken from real accusations made against alleged witches I've read about in the accounts of witch-hunting.
> 
> The red thread is okay, an East Asian thing. People who are fated to meet are joined at birth by a red thread, which is only visible at certain hours on certain days of the year. But string games in general occur in cultures all over the world.


	9. Blood Trail

The roads are clear of robbers but there are wolves. Packs of them, thick as rats in a grain pit, who come out of the trees and into the open in broad daylight. They spook the horses, scare the count even more badly. He won’t let them stop long enough for Kate to take an arrow to one, but keeps them moving so quick that Kate thinks him more frightened of the wolves than of her father.

“Or you, little lady. Though he’s a good husband, isn’t he? Leaves you alone at night, scowls at you in the morning.” Kate rides in the carriage. If she cannot kill she will not waste the saddle-leather, and the cushions here are plush and comfortable, the girl nestled on her lap sweet as sin. “How came you by such a fine fellow?”

“Your father,” Lydia tells her, head lying against Kate’s shoulder. “He opened his doors to many.”

Kate laughs, and raps at the ceiling to hear the coachman rattle his heels. He goes as fast as the road will allow, so fast that they have already shot three horses, but his whip cracks anyway and as the sound of it dies away Kate runs her lips along the curve of Lydia’s ear.

“My father closed the gates when the great death came,” she tells the girl. She closes her hands over Lydia’s wrists, deep in their muff of snowy ermine, and squeezes so the bones sing for her. “He let in those who would pay, those who would do for him what he wanted done. I may be long from his door but I know the man, my darling. Don’t tell me his lies, I’ve heard every one.”

Lydia sinks against her, head turned away to face the shuttered window. The girl breathes in a quick, steady tattoo, and then sighs and stretches. “He bought him for me,” she says. “I wanted a new title, and the old count had died and your father called in the man’s debt on his son.”

Kate smiles, kisses the round dove’s breast of a cheek, and lets one wrist go to open the shutters. A blank sweep greets them: the snow has been falling for a day now, too little to block the roads but more than enough to erase the dead fields, the untended bushes. Here and there the remains of a house or a barn judder from the soft white sheet, and then, sometimes beyond and sometimes not, stalk the wolves.

“They’re different here,” Kate says. She widens the shutters as far as they will go. She would knock them away entirely, if the girl in her lap did not slide one slow, pleading hand up her arm. “You wouldn’t freeze, you little witch. I think you’ve seen colder days than this without a scrap of clothing to your name.”

“Do you?” Lydia says, languid, her hand rubbing back and forth over Kate’s sleeve till the leather gleams. “Are they so different? They look so similar to me.”

“You’re lying,” Kate says casually, but she rests her hand against the top of the window. She marks one hulking wolf as it flits from bush to hillock to tree stump, never a clear shot, always a set of burning gold eyes. “They do, or they should. Like apples from a single tree, but here, see, that one is brown and that one is grey with black points, and this next one has white dapples on its belly. And this one, my dear, with the big red eyes, its fur is as red as yours. A relation?”

Lydia smiles for the joke, but her eyes mark Kate like Kate marks the wolves. “You ask a great many questions.”

“Because I would like an answer.” Kate shifts her from one knee to the other. She is light as down, though the waist prisoned by Kate’s arm bends and bends and yet never seems to come close to breaking. “Oh, I know, you will speak riddles and half-truths, you will want me astray as much as you want me true. But we must pass the time, and anyway, I should judge as much as I ask. I am a hunter, I should know to smell a false trail.”

“And if you do not?” Lydia says. She turns on Kate’s knee and looks with both eyes, straight as a well-fletched arrow flies. She is grave and yet Kate never doubts that the grave is Kate’s own.

Kate shrugs. Lets her hand ride the silk-encased hip, her eyes drift to the wolves outside. Her fingers itch for a knife and bow but they will settle for soft prey as sits on her lap, no fools they. “You do not care, my dear. So I do not care. We will talk now, and later we will have it out. If that scares you, then by all means, seek out your marketplace husband. I can entertain myself.”

“You are a canny one,” Lydia says. She is amused. Her head returns to Kate’s shoulder, and her hand drops to Kate’s knee. “The wolf is no blood of mine. They are different because the great death has scattered the leaders.”

“It does not touch them, that I’ve seen,” Kate says.

“But it kills the deer and the boar and the rabbits, and even the rats.” Lydia circles Kate’s knee with her thumb, lavishing attention on each of the hollows around the joint. “They are hungry, they turn on each other where men haven’t turned on them, and then they come here because the game, what’s left of it, has fled into the mountains.”

Kate kisses her temple, then her bent neck. “Good, my darling. Very good.”

They reach the edge of the Argent lands. There are no towns now for shelter during the night and they must sleep in and under and on the carriage, with fires ringing them and guards posted between. The wolves grow ever more numerous, till one could almost read by the light of so many glowing eyes, but they remain wary. They come close, far closer than any wolves would have dared in the good years, but they stay far enough to leap clear from a crossbow bolt.

A longbow would reach them, but it is stowed away and the count will not let Kate unpack it. He does not approve of her baiting with the bolts, either, and tells her stiffly that her father has forbidden such hunting on his lands.

“He is afraid that someone might kill your brother before you will,” Lydia says, before Kate strikes down her posturing idiot of a husband.

Kate lowers her fist, then drops down by Lydia, turns her shoulder to the count. The men around them are silent and tense, with heads like weighted swivels, always turned from the women. “Is he,” says Kate. “But my brother is no wolf, you’ve said, and neither is my father.”

“Your father is wounded. Your brother tore his leg to the bone.” Lydia draws away the edge of her cloak and pulls the shimmering silk of her skirt taut over her thigh. She traces over her leg with a finger, then lets the cloak fall again and touches that fingertip to her mouth, to wipe a trace of wine from it. “It bleeds and bleeds, no matter what the wound is dressed with. It will kill him eventually.”

“Strange,” Kate says absently. She picks up her plate and eats the evening meal. The food is better than she has had in many months but the portions are no bigger than a girl’s fist, with only hard, gritty, unleavened discs of wheat chaff to make up the difference. She eats the fine stuff, leaves the poor. “Was my father outside when this happened?”

“Inside. At his table, eating,” Lydia says. She reaches beside her for a wolfskin, black as ink, and heaps it high around her shoulders so her face is a milk opal within it. “Through the window, I am told. I did not see it. I was called after, to tend the wound.”

Kate takes a piece of the bread and hurls it out into the dark. She watches a wolf start and leap sideways, and then catches a man before he can hide his stare. “We’ll eat well enough when we see my father,” Kate says dryly. “I am sure he has bought better stuff than this. Although perhaps his money chest is finally run dry, if he cannot buy something to heal himself. He bought life itself, or so I heard, even in the south.”

“He was a little ill. A growth in him, beginning to devour his insides. Those are easy enough to treat, once you have found them out.” Lydia waves a dismissive hand. “And then the great death. He paid to keep it from him.”

“From him alone, if my brother’s daughter and wife died of it.” Kate finishes her wine, then flicks the dregs on the nearest fire. It hisses and spits at her, and she laughs and hisses back, resting her elbows on her knees. “But my brother’s bite, that you cannot heal.”

Lydia shakes her head. “It was not a bite,” she says. “It was a spear, one from your father’s collection. He tried to turn away your brother with it and your brother turned it against him.”

“A special spear, then,” Kate says dryly. “One for killing monsters.”

“One for protection,” Lydia says. She smiles and the fire paints her teeth red. “We are not protectors, you know.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” Kate laughs, and draws the girl up towards the carriage.

The cold deepens. They wake and the snow is halfway up the carriage wheels. The count pushes on, as far as he can, and then his men unharness the horses and they ride the rest of the way. They reach the river and it is half-frozen, plates of ice overlapping from the banks so only a sluggish trickle stubbornly flows on. All her life Kate has never seen it so and it gives her pause.

Then she shakes her head. She puts her hand to the knife at her hip, kicks her heels out of the stirrups, and grips only with her knees as her horse skitters off the bank and onto the first few feet of ice. It groans and mutters under the horse’s hooves but it does not crack.

“You are mad,” the count snaps, chivvying her ashore.

Kate slaps his hand from her reins, and then slaps his face when he raises his hand. His eyes change and the skin of his jaw shifts, and she laughs in his face.

Then she jabs her knee into her horse’s ribs, and sends it barreling flank-first into his high-bred, high-strung mount. His horse jumps aside, stumbles on the frozen ground and its spindly legs, so suited for a flat race, so poor for a close fight, give out from under it. She wheels her mount and leaps it clear, then has it dance away from the next man reaching for her.

She sends a crossbow bolt through his throat, the skin there half-furred, and then hooks the crossbow to her saddle horn and reaches over to tear Lydia from her saddle, pull her flush over Kate’s. Lydia does not struggle save to fist her hands in the mane of Kate’s horse, her head low over the neck, as Kate kicks them forward, away from the wolves.

They gallop across the bridge and through the center of what was once a village, but now is nothing but frozen timbers. The path is well-swept, the snow up to a man’s chest on either side of it, so the wolves flounder while they race over the ground.

It is harder going up the side of the cliff, but Kate slaps the flanks of her horse with the head of a crossbow bolt till it claws like a cat. Blood and froth cover its heaving sides, but it climbs the cliff and clatters down the last turn of the path, and then spills them a few yards from the front gate.

Kate jumps clear before it falls, then turns to drag Lydia up by the arm. She does not pause to see if the girl is injured, or to know whether the crack she heard was ice or her horse’s broken leg. She pulls Lydia up to her front and presses her fist to the girl’s neck, and the head of the bolt pricks a warm, beating pulse.

The wolves spread around them, a big sandy one leading the way. Kate salutes the count’s new shape, bares her own teeth as he growls, and calls for the gate to let her in, and they do.

“Did my father send you?” she says. She leads Lydia down the halls of her old home. There were men at the gate, squat things hiding behind the great winch and crouching over the top, their faces masked in long, ratty hair, but no one walks inside save them. “Or did my brother?”

“Your brother did not send me.” Lydia steps easily enough. Her cloak is rucked to one side, and a tangled mass of hair falls from her half-torn bun, but her pulse is steady against the bolt point and her voice is calm. “Your father wanted you.”

Kate takes them to the great hall first. “Are the wolves his?”

“No,” Lydia says. She opens the door for them, pulling at the heavy ring that takes two strong men to move without so much as a gasp.

“Are they yours?” Kate asks, and presses the point harder.

Lydia turns her head into it, just so that Kate can see her smile. “They will follow me. I did not think you would mind.”

“Oh, my little lady, I think you are right,” Kate says, smiling back. She pushes them into the hall.

It is empty, she thinks at first. The fireplace is dead, filled with nothing but soot and a few half-charred twigs. A tapestry hangs from only half its hooks, the rest of it slumped like a dying man into ragged strips. Chairs lay here and there, overturned or smashed, and a single chalice winks from the table, on its side with the lip half-stove in.

Then Kate looks from the chalice to her father’s chair, and she sees him. A silent, staring thing, swaddled in stained brocade. His hands protrude to grip the arms of the chair but his head is sunk low to his chest, and down one leg runs a thick, wet stain. Across his lap, almost lost in his robe, is the broken top half of a spear.

“Why did my father want me to kill my brother?” Kate asks.

“Because he cannot do it himself, and if your brother lives, then he cannot,” Lydia says. When Kate releases her, she lets out a small, soft breath, not a sigh or a gasp but something more intimate, like a close-clasped prayer.

Kate pushes her well clear before going over to her father. His eyes are rheumy but they see her. He draws a rattling breath that puts flecks of black on his spit-caked lips, and one of his hands uncurls its fingers.

“Why does the spear matter?” Kate asks.

Lydia comes to stand at the other end of the table, where the chalice rests. She picks it up and Kate hears the tinny slosh of a little liquid left. Lydia rights the chalice, then her cloak. Then she draws out a handkerchief and dips it into the cup. It comes up wet, a limp white thing that she dabs against her flushed throat.

“Your father believes that it will kill anything that he wishes, even if that thing cannot be killed otherwise,” she tells Kate. “Your brother believes in nothing, except that it was to hand. It is old, and it has drunk the blood of many men. It had power once.”

Kate snorts. She takes up the spear and turns it over in her hand. The wood is dry as parchment, aged as Lydia says, and the spearhead is rusty. “And why won’t my father die? Don’t tell me that it is the spear, my darling, or your magic hands, or even my fool of an older brother. I know a lie when I smell one, and he stinks of lies. He believes in them, always has.”

Lydia lowers the handkerchief. She stands with both hands on the table and looks at Kate with wide, watchful eyes. “Because he hasn’t died yet,” she says simply.

It makes Kate laugh. She leans back on her heels and lets the laugh roll through her, and then she swings forward and stabs the spearhead through her father’s throat.

The point is brittle and she feels it snap but she forces it through, till metal grates on bone. Then she twists back and forth, back and forth, as if she is churning butter. Her father’s eyes open wide, so wide that they should pop out of his skull. His mouth moves a little. One hand raps urgently against the arm of the chair, then falls limp and the rest of him follows.

She drags him out of the chair, then lets the body slide off the spear to the floor. Kate puts her foot on her father’s belly and pulls the spear free, then searches out his heart and stabs that, too. The spear shaft shudders in her hands but holds together. Kate pulls it out again, and then turns.

“And what do you want?” she says. She hefts the spear. There was blood left in her father after all, despite how desiccated he looked, and she shakes it off the end. “You want something, fair lady. I know you do. Your kind, they pretend to be things of ice but you have a pulse, you have blood rushing through your veins and I’ve felt it rush. I’ve felt it burn, made it burn, and I know you _want_.”

Lydia has a face like the statue of a saint. Composed for whatever one cares to read into it, sleek still beauty that remains the same no matter what she does. She folds one hand across her belly, lifts the other. She dips the handkerchief into the chalice again, then again. The white cloth blushes, grows streaks of pink and then red.

“I want you to run,” Lydia says. “You could have turned away. But I asked and you came, and now we will not let you leave. We were so long hidden, so long quiet and still, and now we want to _run_.”

She slashes the handkerchief across the table like a thrown knife. It catches the rim of the chalice, tips it over again, towards Kate, and the blood and the cloth spill together as Kate flings the spear back.

The point flies straight and true at Lydia’s pale throat, but it lands amid a flurry of black feathers. Most soon fall, sticking in the blood, but one long black beauty twirls lazily in the air, like a peddler’s toy. Kate hears a raucous cry, and then feels a wintry blast from all sides as the windows burst in their frames. She leaps onto the table and snow pours through the windows like water, roaring and unending.

She runs down the table and jumps as far as she can, and then jumps again when her boot touches the first rising drift. By the time she reaches the door, the snow is halfway up her ankles. By the time she clambers free of the place and out the front gate, it is past her knees. She snarls and draws her knife, and the wolves ranged against her snarl back, baring teeth and claws.

“I’ll run for you if you run for me,” she says, taunting, and then she throws herself forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was that an extended Holy Grail/Fisher King inversion? Why, yes, because I have never run across a mythology book I didn't want to read and repurpose.
> 
> Lydia's conception here basically comes from the Morrigan, which was the forerunner of the banshee. The Morrigan is linked with red, wolves and ravens, and instead of screaming, foretells death by doing things such as washing your bloody clothes for you in the nearest river.


	10. No Fur

Once there was a wolf. Strong, strong enough to crush a man’s head with one forepaw, to tear stones from their mortar, to rend even cold iron bars. A wolf with fierce red eyes, a demon that crossed the river every night and stalked the ruined villages for any poor soul who ventured beyond the high walls of the fort. 

There were a few, made desperate and foolish by their strange, untouched lives amid the pitiless sweep of the great death. They might come for water not turned stale by long hours in old, musty tuns, for the spectral fantasy of fresh meat, game wandering down from the mountain. For a breath of air untainted by a hundred other lungs. They might come for whatever reason, or no reason, that they wished but they would find nothing but the wolf’s teeth closed about their throats.

One or two might crawl so far as the front gates of the fort and there die, crimson snows their last bed. Sometimes the wolf would come too, and prowl the stretch of land just before the edge of the cliff, openly daring the bowmen on the ramparts. Many drew bead on the beast, but the wolf seemed a thing of smoke and malice, vanishing before their arrows, only to howl again that night. It is immortal, they whispered in their rooms, huddled about their dwindling fires. It is not even of this earth, they claimed. It is man’s damnation made flesh, the beginning of the end, the first sign of the Devil’s devouring of the whole world.

It is starving, the wolf. Men make poor meat, though the hot salt of their blood might lick at the thirst that also burns the wolf’s throat. They are shriveled on their bones, tasteless and stringy as tree bark, all the life dried out of them from scanty food, little air, endless hours shivering in the dark while fear eats them up. And they are too few, too far apart, those who still have the courage, or at least the force of madness, to push them out past the walls.

The wolf is starving. There is nothing else but the carrion still hiding in the fort; the rest of the animals have long since fled into and beyond the mountains. It gnaws at river stones and driftwood to taste its own blood and forget the vicious wrench of an empty belly. The huge tracks of its paws, each print greater than a man’s fist, are the only tracks that break the endless, eternally virgin snow. When it howls, the echo of its voice seems to beat ghosts about the wolf’s head, and sometimes it runs and chases and replies only to find itself tearing up the end of its own trail.

It is strong enough. It could survive till spring, a shaking, skeletal thing spraddled in some half-buried hole for the meltwaters to wash out. It can go up into the mountains and hide and sleep and try.

The wolf turns back on itself, slashes its own flanks. Blood wells thickly up, steaming in the parched, icy air. Snarling, the wolf lashes its claws once, twice against the earth, and then skirts the foothills, lopes along the river, and plunges into the still-unfrozen waters.

It comes up at a place of ashes and sentinel heaps of stones. The wolf rakes its paws over the earth, once black with cinders and now a wan grey, faded by the winter winds. It digs here and there, till the grey livens with splashes of red, but it turns up nothing.

Next it tries the graveyard near the fort. The old lord is called, with his son, but the lord will not open the gates, nor will he allow an extra watch of guards to shelter the yard with arrows from the ramparts. The men cannot be spared, the arrows cannot be replaced without a dangerous sortie into the mountain timber. And besides, the old lord says, with a contemptuous sweep of his hand, the ground is frozen and the wolf clearly mad. Let it blunt its teeth and claws trying to rip into the earth. The dead will not feel it.

His son clenches his jaw and his fists, and stares over the fort’s walls at the burrowing wolf. He sees the heavy heave of the wolf’s flanks and chest, the sloppiness of fatigue in each ragged sweep of a limb. The flecks of spittle dripping from the wolf’s jaws seem to wet his own cheeks, and the steaming mists rising about the wolf’s snapping muzzle to fill his own mouth with fetid heat. When the wolf lifts a paw and a tracery of blood falls in its wake, he smashes his fist against the balustrade and then leaves, his knuckles slick and stinging.

One night the lord holds a banquet. Something to raise the spirits, celebrate life in these hard times. He has witch’s tricks light up the great hall and wine spilling into every cup, and as a special treat, a hoarded flock of sparrows, bought dearly from one of the sly-faced, strange merchants that have found shelter under his roof. The birds flit wildly about the room, kept so long in their cramped cage that freedom seems to drive them insane. Some dash their brains out against the walls, some fly too close to the blazing fire and drop into the flames, half-suffocated. Some fall to cups, knives, pebbles flung by the laughing guests.

A very few make it to the rafters, where they peck incessantly at the windows till the smiling lord calls for the shutters to be opened. They have earned a little sun and warmth, he says, and his guests roar because it is black night and the birds will freeze before they have half-escaped the room.

The wolf comes in one of the windows. Its flanks are already matted with blood, and afterward a servant will find broken teeth and claws fallen out from rotten roots mixed with the dishes on the table. It roars back, leaps from window to table to floor and leaves three dead in its wake. Four.

Knives thrust into its haunches and it snarls at them, backs into a hopeless corner and then springs out over their heads. A thrown torch makes it veer away, and then another singes its face and forepaws as it overturns a bench.

The lord rises from his chair and raises a stiff finger. His son snatches up a bow. He puts an arrow through the wolf’s paw and the wolf howls, then scrabbles its way back up to the window. There it stops, hunched about its wounded limb. It stares down at them.

The son nocks another arrow, and the wolf’s eyes snap to him. They look at each other. The last of them, the wolf thinks, gnashing its teeth. Blood runs fresh down its jaw, and he looks again at the people below. Shut up in this place, wasting away, the bodies here looking no different than the ones he has taken beyond the walls. And then this hunter, facing him, heartbeat wild and fast and the only life left in this place.

The last of them. And spring still so far away, and no knowledge that the melting snows will reveal anything but more barrenness. This man, he’ll waste away too, soon enough, eaten up like the rest, and perhaps they will totter out of their dens to stare across the river at each other’s skin-draped bones.

Perhaps the wolf will kill him now, before that arrow flies. One last death, violent and furious, while life still beats enough to be heard—but no, it would not be last because then the _wolf_ would remain.

The hunter shoots. The wolf twists away from the arrow, then crashes through the window and out onto the roof. It races blindly over the tiles and down into the courtyard, only to come up against a group of jerking, shouting, wood-and-cowardice puppets. Dried-out things, blood rank in the mouth. The wolf will not die at such hands. It will not _die_ , no matter what company that forces upon it.

It strews them into disarray with a single slash, then races along the walls and dives into the broken place it had found in the walls, the pipe where the cold had cracked open the mortar and pushed out the covering bars. The wolf squeezes through. Its bones rub the sides and roof of the pipe but the blood on it makes its fur slick. It comes out the other end and runs out onto the snow, then turns around.

Torches burn above the gate, so brightly that they make a scarlet halo, like the backdrop of a traveling play. The old lord stands there, and so does his son. His son waves his hand out towards the wolf and gestures urgently; the wolf can see the flare of the man’s nostrils, the way he straightens and seems to fill out with the free air. His father draws in tight, wound deep into fine, strangling robes, and then lashes out once. He slaps his son and then turns away.

His son rocks on his feet, but moves no more. The gate stays closed. The wolf circles once, raging and impotent, and then throws itself away from the fort.

The wolf runs till it cannot run but must walk, and then walks till it cannot walk but must crawl. The thing that burns in it, that keeps it clawing and snarling, that forces hot breath from its aching lungs and sends tears down to ice over its cheeks, it cannot free itself from it. It cannot silence it, it cannot turn away and it cannot turn to either. Blood and fight and the hot press of bodies at its back, the joy of a strong, fierce body leaping before it, _at_ it, that is what it wants, but that is what it cannot have. What has died, what has been killed, what it has lost and what it has torn asunder with its own hands.

He will not die, but he hates to live so.

Peter crawls on his hands and knees, and then his hands alone. His blood soaks the snow behind him. He feels wet clumps of his own fur drop off his shoulders and back, and when he finally turns and curls in on himself, he sees them spot his trail like his very footprints are rotting away.

The wind cries above him and something rattles. He looks up, and finds himself in one of the vacant houses. The roof is half-fallen, the remaining timbers bent low under their load of snow and ice. Everything within has long since been taken or frozen away, with only the swaying four walls and his tired, bleeding body.

And the boy. Stiles looks at him, standing over Peter, with a face like the graven faces in the cathedrals, once kings and saints and warriors but now no more than blank stone. He wears dull, dark clothes, not for mourning but for bitter plainness. Nothing to stand out, nothing to show a sign of life.

“This is not my house,” Peter snarls. He cradles his hand, with the broken arrow shaft still piercing his palm. The wood pushes out easily, and at first the blood runs hot but it lasts for only a spurt or two. Then he feels the cold again, creeping along his hips and his spine and settling firmly on his shoulders.

Stiles nods. He draws back his cloak, then takes it off his shoulders and folds it over his arm and then back on itself. Then he sinks down beside Peter. He puts the cloak aside and sits by Peter’s head, with his hands in his lap. “You have no house,” he says. He sounds almost gentle, like the soft sleep the snow can bring. “You never have, and you never will.”

Peter tries to draw a breath and the air stings the back of his mouth with blisters of ice. He chokes, then puts his cheek down on the ground. He had a family, he thinks. He had blood. He had that, once. “I am not weak,” he says. He means it as a snarl, he thinks, he wishes, but it comes out a cry and he cannot hide the ring of truth in it. “I am not sorry. I am—I am—”

“You are a wolf,” Stiles says. He lays his hand against Peter’s cheek. It is cool. Not bitter cold like the wind, but cool and smooth, like water over a burning throat. He strokes Peter’s face, and then Peter’s hair, and it feels as if he is gathering up all the bits and bones and blood of Peter in his cool soothing fingers and taking them away.

Pride rises once, but it is already dying in Peter’s mouth. “You are not kind,” he whispers. He closes his eyes. “You do not have anything that I cannot take.”

“I am kind, in my way. Not yours, not my people’s, but mine alone.” Stiles runs his fingers along the curve of Peter’s skull and then forward, along the jaw till his fingertips push at Peter’s mouth. 

He bends forward and his breath is warm, his fingers are warm. His pulse beats out from his fingertips, drumming insistently against Peter’s lip till Peter opens his mouth. Peter cries out as he does, a sucking, dying cry, but he can smell the blood on the boy. Fresh and sweet, like spring.

“I have nothing that you can find for yourself. You know this now. You understand.” Stiles cradles Peter’s chin against his palm and feathers his thumb across Peter’s eyes, till Peter groans and opens them. Then he bends low and he smiles at Peter. “You can run,” he says softly. “Always. But first come to my hand, wolf. Come and drink.”

He lifts his hand from Peter’s face and moves it aside. Something stirs. Peter smells deer— _deer_ —and reels from it, catching himself up in the grip of Stiles’ hand. He starts and Stiles clucks at him, a mother with a newborn. Holds Peter’s neck as the deer stretches slowly beside them, its head wrenching inch by inch back over its spine, its white breast growing scarlet with blood. 

Stiles cups his free hand under the thick, sluggish flow. The blood pools in his palm, then splashes up as Peter finally twists over, drags himself to it, buries his nose and mouth till he breathes it. He chokes once, his shoulders tense, his legs shifting to coil under him, and then he shudders and spreads his knees, lowers his head. He drinks long and deep, snorting, snuffling into the boy’s hand, lapping after every drop.

The grip on his neck changes. It slips, Peter thinks, but then the fingers lengthen, curve down and under and he looks up and Stiles smiles again. Touches his bloody chin, then slides one finger along the collar ringing Peter’s neck. Peter hisses and wrenches away, then falls upon one arm and sags till his forehead touches the ground.

He feels Stiles rub the collar again. It is some cool metal, perfectly round, like silk but for the weight and the clench of it, and he knows without trying that it will never lift. He shudders again, but when he leans, the collar sways him forward and then he lifts his head and lets the hand stroke upwards, till it caresses the underside of his jaw. He is warm, he thinks suddenly. Warm and full, and as he lies over the boy’s lap he watches his skin smooth and turn pink.

“You do not want a house,” Stiles says. He laughs a little, tilting Peter’s head up against his chest, and then curls his hand around the collar and bends to kiss Peter. His mouth is warm, salty with blood, and it makes Peter shiver and flatten himself more surely than any blow. “You want to run, wolf, same as I, and we will run.”

Then he stands. He pulls Peter to knees and hands, and then stoops for his cloak. It is red when he lifts it, red as the blood that marks his fingers. He slips the heavy cloth about Peter’s shoulders, then hooks his fingers in Peter’s hair and draws them out of the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reworking the Red Riding Hood elements a little bit.
> 
> When animals die, their heads often curl backwards because of the way the muscles contract as their bodies go rigid.


	11. Silver Couchant

His father comes out himself to see Chris staked and chained. They pull a wagon into the courtyard and knock off its sides, and hammer a post in the middle, and then hammer a staple to the post. From that staple swings the chain. When they put Chris on the wagon bed, the chain is long enough to cinch about his neck and then let him lie at the very foot of the post, so long as he rests his head on his arm. They leave his hands and his feet free; he is too injured to use either and his father will not waste the metal.

“Though by the grace of God, perhaps I will see some return.” His father stands by the side of the wagon, with his cane and a thin, brown-haired girl beside him, who has restless hands that stray towards his ermine-fringed cape and narrow, dull eyes. “We once put out the worst of our hounds like this, if you remember. Not the weakest but the worst of them, the manglers, the ones who would not learn and who could not show their bellies. Sometimes we found them dead, sometimes alive but broken, cringing things. And once in a great while, my son, we would find them the better for a stay in the woods.”

“Find them fat-bellied with some wolf’s get, or so wild all you could do is chain them out again, and let their howls bring down the rest of the pack,” Chris mutters. He is so cold that he almost misses the pains in his body. They have taken his clothing, left him the crusted blood and grime for a blanket. “And that you call better.”

“Stronger.” His father folds his mouth in disapproval. “My son, in that you once came from my seed. You are so low now that I cannot recognize you. I will be glad if we find something of use afterwards, but I am prepared to let everything you take go to waste. These are difficult times, Christopher, and we cannot be as forgiving as we once were.”

Laughter racks Chris, twists him around the post like a winched rope. The links bite coldly into his throat and rag the laughter into wheezing breathes. He turns his head away, and does not watch the man who fathered him go.

They hitch the oldest, weakest of the remaining horses to the wagon and whip it till it goes grudgingly out through the gate. The snow lies somewhat more shallowly over the path down to the river than to either side, and the poor animal seeks the easiest way so it follows the depression, floundering, with pathetic whinnies and coughs. Someone urges the horse on with the occasional blunted arrow at its hindquarters, shot from the safety of the walls.

When the wagon lurches out of bowshot, the horse still trudges on. It is blowing, sweat frozen in thick cloudy rimes over its back and flanks, and Chris can feel the beast’s fatigue in the desperate way it falls into each forward step. Why it keeps walking, Chris does not know. Perhaps the gurgle of the river calls to it, promising at least fresh drink. Perhaps it hallucinates like some dying men, and sees a broad green pasture ahead. Perhaps it is already dead in the mind, and cannot think to stop the drag its feet.

The wagon creaks down the side of the cliff and through the remains of the first village. They come to the bridge and the horse balks, side-stepping as if to plunge down the side and into the river, but then something makes it prick up its head. It lets out a fearful, agonized scream and then lists, its head going between its knees.

The horse cries out again, softer, higher, like a baby. It sways from side to side, and then it wrenches the wagon forward, up onto the bridge. They crest the slight rise and then come down the other side. The horse stumbles, claws forward without righting itself, and then stumbles again and slumps in its traces. Chris hears its breath rattle to an end, then hears the dull groan of the wagon wheels. The weight of the wagon pushes it the rest of the way, over the dead horse and onto the ground between the bridge and the woods. Then it stops.

A gust of wind slithers across the wagon bed. Wood cracks and pops and shudders, and for a moment Chris takes it for movement and he pushes his back against the post. But the wagon rocks once and settles.

He shivers, shifting against the post. The chain clacks and clinks at him like a scolding tongue. Chris raises his head to pin the links back against the post and then snarls as another breeze slaps winking, hard specks of ice across his face. He spits and then coughs, and pushes himself up, dragging his arms across his belly, until he is half-sitting against the post.

From here he can see the fort, so they can see him. He does not pretend to look for his father in the dark spots along the tops of the walls.

He breathes in deeply. The air is so harsh here, cold as if to set the ice deep into the bones, and then set it alight like fire. It is harsh and pure and sweeps down his mouth and throat out to the very tips of his fingers and toes, stinging him to life even as it freezes it out of him, and he thinks that he has missed it. He looks from the squat, black fort and its dead child of a village to the great woods, with its seething mass of trees that stretch and grasp even in this deepest of winters, and hot pins lance his legs and feet so they jerk and twitch under him.

Chris pushes his shoulders against the post. His bones twist and scream. He heaves the pain out his mouth in rough, sucking gasps and he pushes again, then lets his body weight sway from side to side. The chain yanks close around his throat, nips and then sinks in, and makes him bleed. It’s so hot, his blood, so hot he flinches and thinks his skin must blister, even under the driving north wind.

“Peter,” he says. The wind cuts the word from his tongue and hurls it aloft. He licks his lips and feels them dry to ice. “Peter.”

A wolf sits on the edge of the wagon bed. Then a man, naked but for the silver band at his collar, crouched on his haunches with the warm flush of health across his chest and belly. “I can’t kill you,” he says, shaking his head. His eyes are clear and cold and blue. “Not now. You had to ask before.”

“I am not _asking_ ,” Chris says. He throws himself against the chain, then slumps back. His head swims and he forces his hand up, works numb fingertips through the links, levers them out of his swelling flesh. The blood slicking over them feels like the stinging whip of nettles. “Kill me. You wanted to, didn’t you? I saw you. I saw you.”

Peter’s limbs are still. His chest hardly lifts to breathe, and the planes of his face lie quiet and smooth as new-fallen snow. His eyes are still, too, still and hot and their fire feeds on the blood dripping down Chris’ neck.

“You could kill me.” Chris drags back one leg, hikes up the knee. Something tears, in the joint and in the thigh, and maybe under the toes where the boards splinter, but he gasps down the pain. He kicks out at Peter and then falls half-over from the wildness of it, choking from the chain, his fingers wrenching in the links. “You could, but you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t, I saw you, you wouldn’t—”

His head cracks against the post. One of his fingers breaks, bent between the chain and the body crushing him. His other fingers are already broken, curling uselessly over the shoulder grinding into his swollen ribs. A steaming breath paints his chest with damp and then a tongue sears that away, hot and wet itself but rasping him dry wherever it goes. It scores up his breastbone and over his shoulder, laves roughly at the base of his throat.

Teeth push at his flesh. He sucks in air, feels Peter suck at his blood. Bruising, molding already tortured skin around long, sharp teeth. The shoulder driving in his chest rocks forward and Chris cannot find the space to breathe. He wrenches himself up, then over. Beats his arm at Peter’s back, no stronger than a child, but the pressure diminishes and Chris gulps in cold, sweet, killing air.

Peter raises his head. His eyes are red now and Chris stills, then grins. It is a little crazed, the grin; it tears at the corners of his mouth, where the flesh is already split and sore. It makes Peter pause and Chris forces his numb lips back from his teeth, amused. “Can you kill me?” he says, and then shakes his head. “You coward.”

The red eyes flare white with rage. Peter lunges and snaps, and then drops onto Chris’ legs. He is choking too, one hand at his collar, his eyes bleeding blue, and Chris looks from him to the hand holding back his head and then up to Stiles.

“Well, isn’t this what you want?” Chris demands. “Isn’t this what should happen? Let him bite.”

Stiles smiles too, and his smile is not a tear but a cut, made exact as a gem-cutter’s work, where the bright heat can flicker through the placid glass of his face. “They say you could die.”

“I won’t die. I won’t die any more than my father will, shut up in his fort,” Chris hisses at him. “I’ll turn, that’s what you want, that’s what he thinks, I’ll turn wolf and go back and he will let me in. He’ll think I’m finally strong, finally fit for his hand but I won’t heel but to tear his throat out. And then my family will be done, my blood food for the worms, and you’ll have everything you want.”

“Is that what we want?” Stiles says. He tugs at Peter’s hair, then lets it slip free as Peter settles sullenly at his feet. His gaze crosses Chris’ face, dips to the links locked about Chris’ neck, and then he sweeps back his cloak and kneels. 

He reaches out and touches Chris’ throat, just over the bite of the chain. His fingers are cool, but cool like spring water, like aloe, like things that draw the pain and quiet the body and let life stir again. Chris flinches like it hurts, and then the real hurt rises once more and he cannot hold up his head, it spins so, and Stiles cups his chin and holds it for him.

“You are not a wolf,” Stiles tells him. The side of a finger pushes softly at Chris’ mouth, and when he opens it Stiles strokes the side of his jaw and it feels like the stroke of mercy, sweet and healing. “Your sister is not dead.”

Chris starts. His eyes had begun to close; he opens them. He stares at Stiles. Then he laughs. “She is dead. She is good as dead, fled when she should have stayed and taken her reckoning. She’s my father’s true child, rotted out before the great death ever came.”

“She breathes still, her blood flows through a living heart.” Stiles moves his hand down to Chris’ throat, and then to Chris’ shoulder. “But that will come later. You are alive too.”

“At your will,” Chris says. His head is clearer. He shifts against the post, and he can feel the scrape and stab of the rough wood at his back. The cold is receding but the pains are lesser, not rushing to set fire to his warming flesh. He touches his neck after Stiles does and finds the wounds of the chain raw but closed.

Stiles shrugs. His cloak slides over his arm, then further, unfastening of its own accord and dropping to fold carelessly about the man waiting at his knee. “If you like,” he says. He smiles, tipping his head. Touches Chris’ arm above the elbow. “Your family lives. You may think the claim forsaken, but the blood stands for now. But I think you stand by your words, my lord.”

Chris draws his breath slowly. It still chills him, still rakes his throat with icy nails. “I am not a lord,” he says. “I was never a lord. I was my father’s hound and never more.”

“You stand by your words,” Stiles says again. His hand rises to the chain at Chris’ throat. “But you do not stand with him, do you?”

“Will you ask me to stand?” Chris says, snorting.

Stiles shakes his head, curling his fingers around the bloody links. With his other hand he reaches back and he runs his fingers along Peter’s collar, half-affectionate, half-ruling. Peter growls and grovels and butts his head into Stiles’ knee, then rests it there, watching Chris.

“I will ask you no more than you are suited for,” Stiles says. He pulls at the links and they begin to slide free, slow, sticking to Chris’ breast with half-dried blood. “You are made as you are. I will not cut a different shape.”

“You are a kind master,” Chris says dryly. He half-sees Peter still, but then the last link slips free and he straightens without thinking.

Stiles sits back. He wipes his bloody fingers in Peter’s hair, letting them trail to where Peter laps and sucks for the treat, and then puts his hand on his knee, palm up and fingers open. “I can be, if you have the heart for it.”

He waits. The cold steals in between them and lays numbing fingers on the back of Chris’ neck so he shivers. Chris hunches his shoulders, then works them back and down. They feel stiff, and his neck feels naked and stretched, and his eyes weighted to come again and again to that open hand.

Chris breathes in. He smells the air, and then he pushes off the post. His arm comes out slowly and he jolts as he catches himself on his hand. Then he bends over Stiles’ knee. He breathes again and he does not mean to but he smells the boy, smells the air riffling around them. Smells one of the two, or perhaps it was always only once, but he breathes in again and again and it smells so sweet, so clean. It cuts him through like a razor and still he breathes.

Stiles slips his hand out from under Chris’ mouth and closes it over the back of his neck. Pushes it down, down, till Chris flattens against the wagon bed, has to fold his elbows and knees out and lie on his belly.

Not all of him has healed. His ribs spark hotly, unevenly. He humps up to ease the strain on them and a heavy, hard body drops on his back like a mountain. It forces the air from his lungs up against his teeth; he worries and tears it to ragged hisses, digs his nails into the wagon, tries to brace his knees to rise. But Stiles’ hand pins him like an iron stake.

He feels hot, panting breath on him, over and under the grip on his neck, and a blank wildness takes him. Chris surges up against the hand, against the crushing body, his elbows and knees dragging back and forth as if to grind furrows into the planks. He gasps quicker and quicker, twists his head, throws it back, but he cannot rise.

Teeth sink into his shoulder. He freezes, then starts _into_ the bite, throws his weight up against the sinking fangs, splays his knees so his hips drop flush to the wagon bed. He feels lips graze him, soft over the piercing teeth, and then they pull back so only cold air feathers the welling blood. Hands press at his ribs, make them sing and him snarl through clenched teeth. They drag up and down his sides, scratch his flanks, curve around his hips and squeeze his buttocks, draw blood up to blacken and boil under his skin.

He wrenches himself back and forth. His flesh tears open on the teeth in his shoulder, and he thinks he hears the muffled grate of fang on bone. Blood spills thickly down his back, turns the panting at his neck to wet snorts and sucks. He arches his neck against the hand that holds him and the man at his back snarls as if it were his hand. Chris hears that, hears the want just as he feels the way Peter’s claws try to shave him down, make him slot tamely underneath, and he snorts his own blood as he laughs.

The hand on his neck pulls smoothly up, catching thumb and forefinger under his jaw. It stretches him out, crooks his head up and back. He stares into the eyes of something so deep and cold and true that it burns as fierce as any summer bonfire. His body ruts mindlessly under that gaze, parts its legs and rises to sheath back on a thick, dripping cock. He mouths for air, for more and more even as his lungs fill up. He feels like his skin is blistering under those eyes, splitting and peeling back and falling away, till only his bones are left. And then they fail too, turning hard and then brittle and then cracking, one by one, until all that remains, all that has and will ever remain, is the eternal clasp around his throat.

Chris rolls awkwardly over, away from the others. He pants and blinks to find himself with a mouth, throat, lungs. Blinks again to find eyes and eyelids. His legs flop around him, strange and reshaped, and then he gets them under himself and sways halfway to standing. His joints slide and he falls, then gets back up with a fierce snarl. He stands, and lifts his head, and sees a boy and a wolf.

The wolf rises slowly to its feet, broad pink tongue flipping out and across blood-stained maws. It approaches him with head arrogantly high, jaws open for his snout and he plants his forefeet and curves away his body, snarling. The wolf snarls back, tail lashing a warning, but then circles away and comes back up the boy’s other side, under the ready hand.

The boy pets him and then stoops to hold out his other hand. He smiles as he runs it over Chris’ head, back behind the half-mast ears into the shaggy ruff. His fingers smooth carelessly over the cool metal collar on Chris’ neck.

“My good hound,” Stiles croons. He ruffles his hand through Chris’ fur again, then turns it under Chris’ jaw and wraps his fingers around the muzzle, squeezes gently as he pulls it up. “My hound.”

He looks at Chris and his eyes are bright and shining, mirrored like the clearest of ice: Chris sees a snout, a furred face, two pointed ears. But the snout is broader, rounder at the end, the head differently molded, with eyes that glow like dusk light slanting through mist. He flexes his paws and the claws are short and blunt and hard. He stamps them against the wooden planks and the wolf starts up, sneering. Chris draws back his lips and he can feel that the fangs he carries are just as long, just as sharp. He works his jaws and he thinks he could smash iron with them.

“You’ll stay with me, and watch when I sleep, and guard when I speak.” Stiles straightens, his fingers still caught in Chris’ fur. He draws Chris over as he looks back to the fort. 

Then he looks down, catches the wolf and the hound scenting each other’s breath across his knees. They writhe their lips in silent snarls, heads bobbing as first one, then the other tops out, but their eyes flick past the bared teeth over bunching muscles, twisting backs, dipping tails.

Stiles chuckles. “You’ll run too, I think,” he says to the hound. “You were made to hunt, and hunt you shall. We like an innocent no more than you. Killers have the best blood, give the best chase. So I’ll run you out, here without the walls, with your favored game and all the room you please to stay with me.”

He lifts his hand from the hound’s head. Steps off the wagon, light as floating down, and then turns. The wolf slinks after him, past him, far ahead to nearly the treeline, and then coils back. It huffs as the hound leaps down, comes slowly up by the boy, presses its side tight to one leg.

The wolf lopes back, ears and tail flicking this way and that. It sidles up to nose at the boy’s hand, then turns quicksilver to rub its flanks against the hound’s stiff haunches, jab its muzzle once into the base of the hound’s tail. Then it springs back, short a tuft of fur clipped by the hound’s teeth. It growls, then turns ahead and disappears into the forest. The boy walks after it, smiling.

The hound follows but it draws up short as a girl steps from the underbrush. She smiles at him and he circles to the other side of the boy. The girl’s smile widens. Her hands are folded into a thick white muff and they stay folded, even as the boy slips one arm through hers. They stand side by side, looking at the fort, and after a moment, the hound comes up to them. It sits at the boy’s feet, with head nestled against the boy’s hip and tail curling into the girl’s skirts, and watches with them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They used to draw condemned criminals through the streets in wagons as a public shaming ritual before the sentence was executed.
> 
> I think it's more of a North American tradition to knowingly expose your dogs during mating season, so you can get wolf into your breeding stock.
> 
> Hounds were originally classified as dog breeds that act to track down prey for a hunter (as opposed to retrieving the prey once the hunter's killed it). I don't have any particular breed in mind for Chris, but in my head he still looks fairly wolf-like, and there are hound breeds with pointed ears instead of droopy ones.


	12. Heart's Blood

Kate fights her way down the cliffside. Her clothes are torn, her right leg drags behind her and ribbons of flesh dangle from her left shoulder. She leaves behind her hamstrung legs and smashed jaws and slashed throats, and makes for the village.

Her breath hammers in her chest. The snow grips and sucks at her legs, and more than once she flounders forward to half-swim herself back to her feet. The wolves harry her from behind and from the side, running more lightly over the snow. Her blood drips from their jaws, and once a wolf paw comes away snarled with her golden hair.

She loses her knife ducking from house to house. The damned buildings are little more than matchsticks leaning against each other, and break at the slightest touch. They are no shelter, though when the blade disappears in a crush of snow and splinters, they give her staves and nails and then a hooked chain, once for someone’s dinner pot, now for a smashed eye or two. She staggers behind the wall of the last, her legs trembling with fatigue and blood loss, and then throws herself into the drifts to avoid the wolf leaping down from above.

The wolves force her to the river. She swerves to make for the bridge and a great red-eyed beast, with fur black as the inside of a grave, lopes up from the woods and stands astride the middle of it. He does not snarl but merely stares at her, jaws parted to let the slaver run out, his legs planted wide and firm.

Kate laughs, knowing him. She flings the bloody chain at him for a greeting and then stumbles down along the banks till she finds a stretch where the ice arcs out from either side to gap only a few hands’ span apart. But when she sets foot on the ice, it cracks apart and drops her boot heel into swirling water.

She heaves herself back, scrabbling through the slipping drifts till her shoes sink to hard pebbles. Behind her the ice gnashes, sends fractured moans into the air, and drowns in an unnatural torrent of water. The waves slap into the snow and melt it up to her feet, even as she drags herself up the bank.

She comes to the top and half-stands, up to her thighs in snow. Her hands are greying with cold, her wounds stuck with crimson ice. She blows each breath in great, hurting gusts, and puts her hand to her thigh and looks out at the wolves ringing her. Smiles at them, then laughs.

They are silent, still things. Heads low, forelegs spread, ears back. But their teeth don’t show, their claws hide in the same snow that holds her. The great black one, come down from the bridge, stands at their backs. He is the only one with his head raised but he too is grave and quiet.

The wind riffles across him, brushes aside his fur and Kate marks the collar. She moves her hand to her side, pressing in where the ribs seem fit to burst, and then to her neck, a long slow sweep across the front that the wolf watches. His lip twitches up and she sees a hint of teeth, and she starts to laugh again but he turns away and looks over his shoulder.

And then they come riding up, the pair of them. A boy and a girl, on horses that step so delicately they leave no marks in the snow. They are fine, with their pretty clothes and smooth soft skin. White clothes, pink cheeks, red shading his hair and eyes, red setting her hair to glorious light. He holds a silver chain in one hand that leads to nothing, and has a hound following him, one as big as the black wolf, with fawn fur shading silver at the belly and the throat, collared same as the wolf. And she has a raven sitting on one white-gloved hand, and a ripe red apple held in the other.

“Come for me, then?” Kate says. There is a thick taste in her mouth, thick and bitter. She spits it out and the snow stays clear. She’s surprised but then she shrugs, lifts her hand and wipes it across her mouth and there’s blood enough on her fingers. “Well, my lord and lady, this is as far as I go. As far as you go, I’ll wager. I know you, you and your likes. I know what you want to see.”

“Kate,” says her brother. He steps out from behind the boy’s horse. The hound is gone and he wears the hound’s collar, and Kate idly thinks it sits better on him than any mantle ever did. “Sister.”

“Brother,” Kate snorts. She wipes her hand over her jaw again. “Have you seen father?”

Chris nods. He is sober as ever, even with the boy’s hand on his shoulder and a pack of wolves with their backs to him.

“Have you seen him since I saw him?” she says. She flicks blood at him, and then smiles to see a wolf come near to lick at the stained snow. “He’s dead, dead as our name, dead as your wife and child, and your pride and my mercy. Both our hands, they’ll say.”

“They will be right,” Chris says. His eyes light at the talk of his family, but he stays where he is and the boy strokes his shoulder, like the dog he’s always been, and they cool again. He looks at her as if he is sad, a little, and as if he is relieved, a little. And mostly as if he is finally done with swallowing his sins and standing on them like the saint he is not, and as if he wishes he could see her mouth ripped open. “You should have run, Kate.”

“Did that do you any good?” Kate says. She looks for the black wolf and finds Peter Hale watching her, clawed hand holding a black cloak around him. “Either of you?”

Peter smiles at her to show his fangs. “It wouldn’t have mattered for you,” he says.

“Well, I ran enough.” Kate hears the crunch of teeth and turns. Her leg shakes and she grabs at it, then throws her hair back over her shoulder and looks up. “I ran, didn’t I? I gave you a run, and now I’m done and I will not run from here. And if I will not run, you will not chase. You cannot touch that, your kind. So old, so thin, your blood, you don’t have it in you to spill hotter, younger blood, not when it stands against you. And you will not touch me again, will you, my darling? I am sorry, I did like you.”

Lydia turns the apple in her hand. She regards the perfect bite in it, white flesh dribbling clear juice over red skin, and then nods. “No, my lady, I will not.”

Then she raises her hand, and throws the raven into the air. It wheels up in a flash of black and draws Kate’s eye for a moment. She sucks in a breath, her shoulders dropping. The sky is very blue beyond the raven, blue and wide, and she thinks that if there is no more snow, if she can reach the next town—

The first wolf bowls her over. She falls on her back and then her side; her hips sink but her head strikes into hard muscle instead of giving snow. Another wolf twists around her and rips at her shoulder while the first worries her arm, and then, as the rest crowd in, she sees the boy throw back his head and laugh.

“We are changed,” Lydia’s voice says, crystalline smooth. “We are here now. We eat your food, we drink your wine, we taste your blood.”

Kate screams and screams. They leave her her throat for that, her throat and lungs, though they rend and tear everything else. Then they pull back, still silent. The snow is trampled and melted under their paws, stamped flat and washed over with scarlet.

Lydia bends over her, and as the last breath bubbles through Kate’s lips, she feels the brush of fingertips between her breasts, soft as petals.

Something wrenches deep in Kate, twists and sticks and then gives way. Her broken body hooks limply upward, then falls back. The bloody bubble on her lips bursts and death touches her eyes, turning her vision dark. But not before she sees Lydia lift a human heart and squeeze it, and turn it over so the blood runs out into the lapping tongues of wolves.

Not before she hears Lydia say: “And we lie with you, my lady.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Traditionally, if you're so unfortunate as to be chased by the Wild Hunt, you are supposed to do the counter-intuitive thing and stand your ground. If you do, you'll be spared. If you don't, you'll either be torn apart or chased into Hell, and _then_ be torn apart.
> 
> So Kate does the smart thing, except Stiles and Lydia don't work like that.


	13. The Fair Folk and Fair Weather

Once there was a road. It had once been a well-traveled, well-kept road, but the great death had decimated the towns and the villages and the farms around it, and then robbers and wild beasts and even darker things, things only whispered about in the night, had festered along it, and so no one had had any reason to go its way in some years. But when the spring melt came this year, pulling back the snows from its weedy, rutted, half-erased path, a few travelers ventured down the road.

They had heard of the lord who had gone mad and shut himself up with demons and sorcerers, and had died with no one to bury him. They had heard of the great wolves that stalked the area, far larger and more vicious than any natural beast, with a malice almost human, and they had heard that the great death had smoldered far longer in the area than most, with neighbor turning against neighbor as common a symptom as the buboes. But they had also heard that the soil was rich, left untilled for so many years, and the game had returned fourfold. They had heard that no one else had claimed it after the old lord had died, and they had no land of their own but they had courage and hope and faith. So they came.

It is a little, motley band, with two rickety wagons and undersized oxen to pull them. The pack mules look sturdier, but they are overburdened and seem to go on only with the most fervent coaxing. And the people tending them are shabbily dressed, with rags for shoes and hands worn brown and hard as horn. But they are young, and they smile often, and they clap each other’s shoulders with an easy familiarity.

They come down the road towards the river and the woods and the old fort, and they meet another group of travelers coming the opposite direction. It is a much smaller group, and it is a strange one: a boy and a girl, dressed like lords and riding horses of unearthly quality, but with no servants attending them and no train, save for a pack of dogs. And the dogs are huge, with rippling muscles and sharp teeth that they bare often. They look very wolfish, so much so that the other travelers shiver and draw back, and more than one reaches for a knife or a pitchfork.

But the leader of the first group, a young man with an earnest face and a stubborn set to his shoulders, he raises his hand and then rides forward to meet the new faces. He is the only one with a horse, a stocky, ill-bred mount with a head like a jug, but he sits upon it as if he expects to be recognized.

He is. “Scott,” says the boy. He smiles, a slow, sad smile that turns the heads of two of his dogs, a black and a silver-tan. “Still tending the earth?”

“Still,” Scott agrees. He looks over the pack, tight-lipped, and then loosens as he comes to the girl. He smiles at her and she nods frigidly, but settles back in her saddle without a complaint. “Are you leaving?”

“Scott,” the boy says again, affectionate but chiding. He shakes his head, then bends down as the silver-tan hound, one of the largest of the pack, stretches up an inquisitive head. He gives it a firm pat, sending it down, and then stretches his hand to call back the black dog, which had been nosing nearer and nearer Scott’s horse. “The hunting is poor now, there is nothing for us left. And if there was, then you would not come.”

“Well, you could visit,” Scott says. He is wistful, but something about the way he looks at them feels firm and solid as iron. “When harvest comes round. We’ll have built houses by then.”

Stiles shakes his head again, but it is the girl who speaks, with a slow, sweet voice. “ _Would_ you have us visit you?”

“You could see me.” Then Scott looks back over his shoulder. He straightens and pushes his shoulders back to broaden them, and when he looks at her again he is friendly, open, but he seems a rock in their way, for all that his frame is slight. “They’re good people, all of them. You’ll never want to see them. But you could come and we could talk, like we used to. I miss you both, you know.”

The girl laughs, amused, but she perhaps looks at him a little more softly. “You always think that. I suppose we shall see.”

“And before that, we have legs to stretch and quarry to sniff out,” says Stiles. He rocks back and forth in his saddle, then cocks his head. “Have you heard of any?”

Scott stiffens. He does not like the question but somehow, he shows that it does not affect how he likes the other boy. “Don’t,” he says, sighing. He glances over his shoulder again, and then reluctantly nudges his horse aside. “So I’ll see you again?”

Stiles laughs, and begins to move his horse forward. He and the girl and the dogs wind past Scott, though as he passes, he puts out his arm and he and Scott clasp their hands. Then the road pulls them apart, and for now they go on their separate ways.

* * *

Some day we shall get up before the dawn  
And find our ancient hounds before the door,  
And wide awake know that the hunt is on;  
Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once more  
Then stumbling to the kill beside the shore;  
Then cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,  
And chants of victory amid the encircling hounds.  
_\--from Hound Voice, by William Butler Yeats_  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So Scott's Fair Folk, too, except he's one of the rare nice ones who has chosen to look after humanity.
> 
> This generally was a jumble of every version of the Wild Hunt that I've read/seen. I will also admit to having probably been influenced by _My Mother, She Killed Me, My Father, He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales_ (Ed. by Kate Bernheimer with Carmen Giménez Smith) and Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's anthologies in the _Snow White, Blood Red_ line.
> 
> The full quoted poem:
> 
> Because we love bare hills and stunted trees  
> And were the last to choose the settled ground,  
> Its boredom of the desk or of the spade, because  
> So many years companioned by a hound,  
> Our voices carry; and though slumber-bound,  
> Some few half wake and half renew their choice,  
> Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name -- 'Hound Voice.'
> 
> The women that I picked spoke sweet and low  
> And yet gave tongue. 'Hound Voices' were they all.  
> We picked each other from afar and knew  
> What hour of terror comes to test the soul,  
> And in that terror's name obeyed the call,  
> And understood, what none have understood,  
> Those images that waken in the blood.  
> Some day we shall get up before the dawn  
> And find our ancient hounds before the door,  
> And wide awake know that the hunt is on;  
> Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once more,  
> Then stumbling to the kill beside the shore;  
> Then cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,  
> And chants of victory amid the encircling hounds.  
> \--William Butler Yeats, _Hound Voice_


End file.
